Ten Things You Didn't Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing

From Denny: My husband was just telling me about a documentary covering this same subject today! So, of course, I went to check it out if Popular Science had anything on it and here it is!

Now that we are more technologically advanced than all those years ago for the moon landing it's a bit chilling to see how fragile and vulnerable we were just jumping out there in space like that.

Here's an excerpt from the PopSci article:

"This month marks the 40th anniversary of humankind's first steps on the moon. Auspiciously timed is Craig Nelson's new book, Rocket Men--one of the most detailed accounts of the period leading up to the first manned moon mission. Here, we have ten little-known Apollo 11 facts unearthed by Nelson during his research.

1. The Apollo’s Saturn rockets were packed with enough fuel to throw 100-pound shrapnel three miles, and NASA couldn’t rule out the possibility that they might explode on takeoff. NASA seated its VIP spectators three and a half miles from the launchpad.

2. The Apollo computers had less processing power than a cellphone.

3. Drinking water was a fuel-cell by-product, but Apollo 11’s hydrogen-gas filters didn’t work, making every drink bubbly. Urinating and defecating in zero gravity, meanwhile, had not been figured out; the latter was so troublesome that at least one astronaut spent his entire mission on an anti-diarrhea drug to avoid it.

4. When Apollo 11’s lunar lander, the Eagle, separated from the orbiter, the cabin wasn’t fully depressurized, resulting in a burst of gas equivalent to popping a champagne cork. It threw the module’s landing four miles off-target.

5. Pilot Neil Armstrong nearly ran out of fuel landing the Eagle, and many at mission control worried he might crash. Apollo engineer Milton Silveira, however, was relieved: His tests had shown that there was a small chance the exhaust could shoot back into the rocket as it landed and ignite the remaining propellant.

6. The "one small step for man" wasn’t actually that small. Armstrong set the ship down so gently that its shock absorbers didn’t compress. He had to hop 3.5 feet from the Eagle’s ladder to the surface."

For the rest of this article just click on the title link! Thanks for visiting as always!

Coming Soon: Photographic Memory in a Pill?

From Denny: This sounds too good to be true! The only problem I ask is this: So, do you have a pill for extra capacity brain storage? :) Because you know people would go wild with this, testing it by reading whole Oxford Dictionaries, encyclopedias, going to the Library of Congress and reading through the entire library - the largest in the world - just to find out how much they could retain.

From the folks over at Popular Science. Here's an excerpt:

"Scientists isolate a protein that significantly increases visual recall

"Wish you had a photographic memory? Well, Encyclopedia Brown, drugs may amp your brain up to that point soon. A group of Spanish scientists claim to have singled out a protein that can extend the life of visual memory significantly. When the production of the protein was boosted in mice, the rodents' visual memory retention increased, from about an hour to almost 2 months.

"Unlike the long-term memory creation that was imaged recently, this memory extension only applies to memories made through the poorly-understood visual cortex of the brain."

For the rest of this brief article just click on the title link to get you there! Thanks for visiting!

Tested: Bedside Brainwave Scanner Grades Your Ability to Sleep

From Denny: Here's something interesting over at Popular Science. People have trouble sleeping because of stress, worry about paying the bills, job loss, and now the extreme summer heat.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

"What's it like sleeping with a new device that scores your slumber quality, minute by minute, night by night?

A new device called the Zeo promises to help stamp out bad sleep and wasted time in bed, by bringing deep analysis of sleep patterns, formerly the province of professional sleep laboratories, into the home.

The Zeo comes in two parts: a bedside unit that looks like an alarm clock, with a handsome blue-on-black vacuum-fluorescent display; and a headband with a fairly low-profile black box mounted on its front. Strap on the headband before bed, and as you sleep, it wirelessly transmits data about your brainwaves to the bedside unit.

In the morning, the Zeo gives you a "ZQ" rating -- a score for your night's sleep ranging from 0 to 120. The concept is simple, but having a quantitative measure of sleep quality that you can keep an eye on over a period of time is a boon to those who want to keep an eye on their nights; one of the traditional problems with sleep, of course, is that you're not conscious to observe it firsthand."

For the rest of the article just click on the title link! Thanks for visiting!

Physics: How Does That Martial Arts Bed of Nails Really Feel?

From Denny: OK, these guys got MY attention with this nail bed demo. When I lived in Taiwan during high school I often saw interesting demos like this one from local martial arts experts during public festivals.

Here Popular Science breaks it down as to the physics and what they think it's all about. While part of what the science guys say is true there really is a spriritual component as well. Anyway you look at it, whew! Talk about an extreme sport!



"The Breakdown looks at the physics of a remarkable feat

Is this a death-defying demonstration requiring a level of mastery only arrived at after years of intensive martial arts training, or is it a theatrical display based more on physics than on chi? In order to answer that question, just take a look at the second video. Those guys haven't spent years in the dojo as far as we know, but they do know a little bit about fundamental principles of physics." - Popular Science

Just click on the title link to take you to Popular Science's article or go here.

Astronomy: Top Ten Hubble Scientific Discoveries

Hubble Telescope Image via Wikipedia

From Denny: Popular Science has a new article that is mostly awesome photos of what Hubble has captured over time! They explain the significance of each photo to the furthering education in astronomy. If you prefer a larger view, take a look at the slide show by clicking on the title link and it will take you to the Popular Science site. I love space photos like this!

So much of their article is the history of astronomy: how scientists thought about the universe, speculated and now they know for sure because of the Hubble Telescope. This is such a great summary article that I quoted it here in its entirety as a free source.



All Photos Courtesy of NASA

"10. The Source of Long Gamma Ray Bursts

In the 1960s, US satellites designed to detect gamma radiation from Russian nuclear testing began picking up huge radiation bursts from deep in space. For decades, no one knew where the bursts were coming from. When the Hubble went on line, scientists were able to track the gamma ray bursts back to galaxies with rapid star production, like the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy (pictured). According to Livio, the gamma ray bursts occur when one of the galaxy’s massive stars collapses in on itself.



9. Accurate Measurement of the Hubble Constant

For years, scientists argued over the value of the Hubble Constant, a key component in the equation that measures the speed at which the universe expands. “Before the Hubble telescope, the estimates for the Hubble Constant were different by at least a factor of two,” said Livio. After analyzing Hubble pictures of far-off super novae (the remnants of one are pictured here), astronomers narrowed the value of the Hubble Constant down to within an error of five percent.



8. Stellar Populations

While some of the Hubble’s most notable pictures involved looking deep into space and time, it also made some important observations closer to home... if you consider 2.5 million light years close to home. Scientists knew very little about the histories of even our closest galactic neighbors (like the Andromeda galaxy shown here). But the Hubble, which can focus on individual stars in these galaxies, has allowed scientists to better understand the history of our corner of the universe.



7. Collision Images

Speaking of close to home, Hubble took one of its most important pictures of a planet right here in our own solar system. In 1994, fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter (pictured here), and Hubble provided the first ever recorded images of a collision between two bodies in space. Aside from simply looking cool, photos of the scars left by the collision provided new insights into the makeup of Jupiter’s atmosphere.



6. Counting Planets

Naturally, being the egocentric species that we are, contemplating the mysteries of the cosmos inevitably leads to the question of whether life exists on other planets. To answer that question, we need to know just how many other planets there are. Pictures from the Hubble went a long way towards answering that question. By capturing images of the solar debris disks that eventually coalesce into planets (like the disk shown here around a star in the Orion nebula), the Hubble showed that planets are far more common than scientists previously thought.



5. Extrasolar Planets

And while we’re on the subject of extrasolar planets, the Hubble also snapped the first shot of a planet outside of our solar system. Before this picture of a planet around the star Fomalhaut was taken, scientists had to calculate whether a star had a planet by evaluating the star's wobble. With the Hubble, the astronomers could just take a picture of the planet itself.



4. Black Holes

Astronomers had been theorizing that super massive black holes laid at the center of galaxies for years, but it wasn’t until the Hubble actually took a shot of one of those black holes that the debate was put to rest. “Not only did Hubble discover that there are black holes in the center of the galaxies, but it discovered that there was correlation between the size of the black hole and the size of the bulge,” said Mario Livio, a senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and author of Is God A Mathematician?. “Before that, we did not know that there was a black hole in the center, and definitely did not know that relationship.”



3. Deep Field Shot

This is one of the cases where the aesthetic beauty of one of Hubble’s pictures matched up with its scientific value. The Hubble Deep Field Shot, the most magnified picture of a spot of the sky ever taken with optical light, provided this gorgeous image, and gave scientists the information they needed to accurately calculate the age of the universe.



2. Dark Matter

Long theorized and to this date never directly observed, dark matter may make up as much as 22 percent of the material in the universe. Because dark matter doesn’t reflect or emit light (hence the name), it cannot be viewed with a telescope. However, dark matter still exerts a gravitational pull on the light that passes by it, bending the light like a lens. The Hubble was able to take a picture of light bent by the gravitational lens of nearby dark matter, thus detecting the previously undetectable. This is a picture of light from the galaxy cluster Abell being warped by a gravitation lens from dark matter.



1. Dark Energy

According to the theory of General Relativity, the gravitational pull of every object in the universe would eventually slow, and then reverse, the expansion of the universe. For years, that’s what astronomers assumed was happening. Then came Hubble. “Arguably the most important Hubble discovery is that of dark energy, which is this form of energy that propels the expansion of the universe,” said Livio. “We knew since the late 1920s that the universe was expanding, but thought that this expansion would be slowing down. Instead, we discovered in 1998 that this expansion was speeding up.” This momentous discovery came from measuring light emitted by super novae, like the explosion of the star Sanduleak -69° 202a, pictured here."

Weather: Cool Satellite Photo of Washington, D.C. Flowering in the Spring!

From Denny: Popular Science online magazine featured this photo recently. It's from the GeoEye-1 satellite, orbiting at four miles per second, passing over Washington, D.C. during the Cherry Blossom season this April 4th to "admire the view." ;)

The view was shot from the height of 423 miles as the spacecraft moved from north to south along America's eastern seaboard. Along the tidal basin the cherry trees are in full bloom. The huge number of cherry trees were all a gift from Japan to America decades ago.

Washington, D.C. in bloom Image via Wikipedia

Someone left this comment on their site:

"Can anyone tell me the time of day that the image was taken?

The Washington Monument makes a fantastic sundial, it's almost a shame the builders didn't insinuate analematic features into the monument-scape of the Mall."

Now there's an interesting idea!

For a larger view of this satellite photo, go here.

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