] The Japanese Institute of Space Astronautical Science
] tested two solar sail deployments launched aboard an
] S-310 rocket on 9 August. It is the first time a solar
] sail deployment has ever been tested in space.

So simple, and yet, so complicated

Article: First space test for solar sailing�| New Scientist

] Water owes its intrinsic blueness to selective absorption
] in the red part of its visible spectrum.

An interesting link that was sent to me by someone who was intrigued by my Antarctic webpage on "Why are icebergs blue?"

[ Good stuff... i did not know that before. -k]

Why is water blue?

] In 1912 Wilfrid Voynich, an American rare-book
] dealer, made the find of a lifetime: a manuscript
] some 230 pages long, written in an unusual script
] and richly illustrated with bizarre images of
] plants, heavenly spheres and bathing women. Despite
] 90 years of effort by some of the world's best
] code breakers, no one has been able to decipher the
] script. The failure of the code-breaking attempts
] has raised the suspicion that it may simply be an
] elaborate hoax.

Scientific American has a writeup by Gordon Rugg
on how the manuscript may have been faked.

SciAm: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

] The Hubble Space Telescope has looked deep into the
] cosmic abyss and created a unique baby picture of the
] universe. Until now, images returned by Hubble showed
] galaxies as they appeared when they were cosmic
] youngsters. The new images reveal the galaxies as
] toddlers, in the midst of a period of rapid developmental
] changes.

It's interesting to hear about the Hubble after so many years of it not being in the news.

Hubble Space Telescope Sees Where Time Began

] "It's not new physics nothing new has to be
] discovered, nothing new has to be invented from scratch,"
] he says. "If there are delays in budget or delays in
] whatever, it could stretch, but 15 years is a realistic
] estimate for when we could have one up."
]
] Edwards is not just some guy with an idea. He's head of
] the space elevator project at the Institute for
] Scientific Research in Fairmont, W.Va. NASA already has
] given it more than $500,000 to study the idea, and
] Congress has earmarked $2.5 million more.
]
] "A lot of people at NASA are excited about the idea,"
] said Robert Casanova, director of the NASA Institute of
] Advanced Concepts in Atlanta.
]
] Edwards believes a space elevator offers a cheaper, safer
] form of space travel that eventually could be used to
] carry explorers to the planets.
]
] Edwards' elevator would climb on a cable made of
] nanotubes - tiny bundles of carbon atoms many times
] stronger than steel. The cable would be about three feet
] wide and thinner than a piece of paper, but capable of
] supporting a payload up to 13 tons.

[ I love space stuff, and the things i've read about space elevators all excite me to no end. I really want to see a viable plan. I want to blow my retirement funds on a trip to space. So, the scientists have 40 years, at the outside, to get it working... hop to! -k]

Scientist sees space elevator in 15 years

Scientists have performed successful teleportation on atoms for the first time, the journal Nature reports.

[ Hot damn... -k]

Teleportation breakthrough made

Decius wrote:
] It does imply that we have a lot more oil
] then we think we do, but how much is totally unclear, as the
] actual theory is unproven. In order to measure the size of
] something you must first establish that it exists.

[ This is the crux of it. Even if you accept that there are billions of barrels of oil somewhere underneath the levels we know about, it's going to take a serious capital investment to find, assess, and develop those resources. I think it's a good idea to spend some dollars investigating the theory, especially if it leads to mechanisms that allow you to identify existing fields that are likely to refill themselves at some point soon (i.e. from a bigger pocket underneath it).

In the meantime, as Decius says, the resource is still limited on timescales we care about. It's not effectively renewable, so yes, we could put off the impending lack of oil, maybe for a hundred years or more, so lets look into it, but I think it's still imperative to spend the majority of our resources in this area on finding and building an energy infrastructure that's actually renewable.

This article tripped a wire in my increasingly disorganized brain about an article i read a few years back in Wired which i thought was an interview w/ Dr. Gold (who's cited here)... sure enough, a few tries at wired's Lycos powered search engine yeilded this story from about 4 years ago : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/gold.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=

-k]

WorldNetDaily: Sustainable oil?

] Such scientific conundrums are of only passing interest
] at Superpower, a four-year-old subsidiary of
] Intermagnetics General, and at other companies like it.
] After years of false starts and setbacks, these companies
] say they are closing in on the goal of producing
] relatively inexpensive superconducting wire for power
] generators, transformers and transmission lines.

The Biggest Jolt to Power Since Franklin Flew His Kite

] The 1995 discovery of the top quark and singer Marian
] Anderson's 1947 rendition of "Nobody Knows the Trouble
] I've Seen" may seem unrelated. But through an interagency
] agreement with the Library of Congress, the same
] technology used to study subatomic particles is helping
] to restore and preserve the sounds of yesteryear.

[ Totally cool. Go science! -k]

From top quarks to the blues

I think Virgil showed this to me a while back, and I ran across it today. A nifty way to explore physics

[ Very cool... makes some of the connections more clear and at least offers a fairly complete introduction to physics. Though, I agree with Neoteric that it would be nice to see a few problem sets. The math doesn't always make sense until applied.

In my case, it almost never made sense until applied, and a decent portion of it was still a mystery after that. Physics is hard... let's go shopping.

Still and all this is good and more of this kind of thing will only enrich the web, and those who use it. -k]

Hyper Physics