From solstice to solstice, this six month long exposure compresses time from the 21st of June till the 21st of December, 2011, into a single point of view. Dubbed a solargraph, the unconventional picture was recorded with a pinhole camera made from a drink can lined with a piece of photographic paper. Fixed to a single spot for the entire exposure, the simple camera continuously records the Sun's path each day as a glowing trail burned into the photosensitive paper.

APOD: 2012 January 21 - Days in the Sun

David Owen:

The day after Dave Crawford and I inspected nighttime Tucson, I drove five hundred and fifty miles north to Bryce Canyon National Park, in southern Utah. That evening, I joined about two hundred people, including many children, outside the visitors' center, where telescopes of various sizes had been set up in the parking lot. Several were equipped with computerized tracking devices, which could be programmed to find and follow interesting objects in the sky. At one station or another, I saw the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter (tiny dots in a line), Saturn (with rings), a dense group of old stars, known as a globular cluster, a pair of twin stars (one blue and one gold), and the mountains and valleys that Galileo saw on the moon. With just my own eyes, I saw the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, which rapidly crossed the sky just before eleven o'clock, and, a little later, I saw the meteor-like flash of a passing Iridium satellite.

I spoke with Chad Moore, the program director of the National Park Service's Night Sky Team. "Many people who come to our programs have never really looked at the night sky," he told me. "A woman once came up to me and said, 'The moon was out during the day this morning -- is that O.K.?' "

I laughed out loud when I read that last sentence.

Here's a photo I took of the daytime moon in Bryce Canyon:

And for good measure in reference to Bruce Sterling's photos of a recent Texas fire, here are two of a 2009 fire at Bryce Canyon:

The Dark Side

From the State of the Union:

"A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creator -- and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale." (Applause.)

The Whole Truth? Why bother if you're not under oath? It's always so boring and complicated. You aren't a wonk, are you?

So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system.

These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem.

George W. Bush would like to make them illegal.

This may be true, but don't call him "anti-hybrid":

"We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen."

A mouse is a mouse. Who are we to tweak it? Let's focus on nanobots instead. Those are safe -- and ethical, too!

Here's a thought. If sending iPods to Congressmen can change their thinking on intellectual property, maybe someone could send 535 of those green fluorescent mice to the Capitol. That would be sweet.

Human-Animal Hybrids

Americans do not believe that humans evolved, and the vast majority says that even if they evolved, God guided the process. Just 13 percent say that God was not involved. But most would not substitute the teaching of creationism for the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Here is the most interesting divide that emerges from this poll:

Humans evolved, God did not guide process:
Kerry voters, 21%
Bush voters, 6%

There's a certain quality of reflexive incredulity to this story. It's as though the evolutionists (via the media) are saying to the creationists, "I can't believe you still don't believe!" And they're doing it in such a way that depicts the creationists as Slow.

This poll is more entertainment than serious inquiry. I think it is unnecessarily issue-oriented, on the basis of writing a news story using the "findings." It would work better as a study instead of a poll. You don't really need to use the terms "evolution" and "creationism." First, ask them if they believe in God. Next, ask them to define the scientific method. Then ask or not they "accept" the scientific method. Finally, ask them how they react to conflicts between the scientific and the religious. You might get more dialogue going if you open it up a bit, allowing people to talk about cosmology. It would also reveal, perhaps to the surprise of some, just how many people still believe in astrology.

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In Britain, some people have taken to mocking Richard Dawkins, saying that he's had just "one idea" in his career, and he can't stop talking about it. His one idea is the "Selfish Gene."

I suppose the same type of thing was said about Darwin in his day.

Creationism Trumps Evolution