SALINA, Kan. - Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett on Thursday became the first person to fly around the world solo without stopping or refueling, safely touching down in his custom-built plane 67 hours after taking off. … The project was financed by Virgin Atlantic founder Sir Richard Branson, a longtime friend and fellow adventurer.

Source: Yahoo News

For information about the plane or the mission in general and for some cool pictures please visit: http://www.virginatlanticglobalflyer.com

Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) has a excellent tribute to the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on Mars approximately one year ago. JPL Multimedia

TNO has produced the largest digital panoramic photo in the world. So, what do we mean by large? After all, modern consumer cameras can easily take a picture with 5 million pixels. Well, we are talking about a photo of completely different dimensions. One with 2.5 billion pixels - that’s 500 times more pixels. If this photo were printed, it would measure 6.67 m by 2.67 m (300 dpi). The photograph shows Delft and its surroundings in the autumn of 2004. It was taken the top of the Electrical Engineering faculty of Delft University, at a height of about 100 m, by TNO.

Here’s the Slashdot link.

The coolest part is that they have the entire picture hooked up to a flash app. You can see the entire view and then specifically zoom to see something in the distance. I was even able to view the license plate and makes of some of the cars in the picture!

Fusion power, the Holy Grail of the scientific community, is predicted to operational (at least operational for their experiments) by the year 2014 (though it might be earlier if all the lasers do not need to be built).

From the Times-Herald Online article:
When completed, a 192-beam instrument is expected to be both the world’s largest and its most intense laser, capable of creating temperatures and pressures similar to those inside stars. When all 192 lasers in the NIF are operating, they’ll focus 500 trillion watts - more than 1,000 times the power generated in the United States - on their target, albeit only for a few billionths of a second. But, as Dr. Craig Wuest, NIF assistant project manager, explained on a recent tour, before the beams are powered up by pre-amplifiers and huge main amplifiers, they barely have the power of a spark. “(The pre-amplifiers) take the energy of the very low-energy master oscillator - it’s only about a billionth of a joule - and they amplify it 10 billion times to a few joules … A billionth of a joule is very small; it’s like the amount of energy a fly uses to push off a tabletop.”

The entire project is estimated to cost $3.448 billion, “roughly the initial cost of the Hubble Space Telescope plus a B-2 ‘Stealth’ bomber.”

I believe that research like this, however costly, is necessary for our future energy requirements. Providing that we can produce fusion power that gives off more energy that it can take in, this will be money well spent towards the continuing growth of the world population.

NASA is seriously thinking about this: Now Nasa looks to change Mars into a garden of Earthly delights

Within a couple of decades, Mars could be habitable to life. The current idea is to station large mirrors that concentrate sunlight on the polar caps, releasing carbon dioxide, thickening and warming the Martian atmosphere. (Carbon dioxide is a green house gas). The concern that some scientists have is that in terraforming Mars, we would not only be harming our planet but also another planet. Plus they argue that with the recent rover evidence of water and methane (a byproduct of biological life), terraforming Mars would be unethical.

I think life on Mars, even possibly living bacteria (as possibly shown by the methane release), will be discovered this year or the next. This life should thoroughly be classified and categorized to see if and how it fits into Earth’s taxonomy. Will life on Mars have the same genetic makeup, consume the same nutrients, or use the same amino acids? These types of questions should be answered and explored. But then, I would love to see Mars terraformed. Can you imagine in the not-so-distant future, traveling to Mars for vacation?? Humans are rapidly consuming resources and land on Earth. Mars would be a great place to expand humanity.

Currently we (humanity) has all its eggs in one basket. Expanding to another planet would be the smartest way to increase our species chances of survival in the next millenia. If not a habitable destination for a long time, at least it would provide another off earth starting point for space travel. New telescopes orbiting Mars (or on the moon) would provide clearer images of the universe at Creation.

Plus, it would be just plain cool. Imagine having to indicate on the destination of mail, not only the country but the planet as well? I heard somewhere that the gains in the previous century (1900-2000), while great, will be incomparable to the gains made in the next century (2000-2100). My great-grandparents went from horse and buggy to the advent of space travel. I believe that the next century will build off of space travel. The great triumphs of the next century will be huge advances in space travel, medical breakthroughs in cancer and viral diseases (though new treatments will need to be developed to combat increases bacterial resistance to antibiotics), and quantum computing on a level that defies Moore’s Law.

In synesthesia, sights can have sounds, sounds can have tastes and, more commonly, black-and-white numbers and letters can appear colored

Read this MSNBC article on synesthetes. A synesthete is a person with the rare ability to be able to see sound in varying colors or taste music. The article entitled, “Real Rhapsody in Blue” written by Anne Underwood of Newsweek, describes the experiences of Julian Asher. “In Asher’s ever-shifting vision, violins appear as a rich burgundy, pianos a deep royal purple and cellos ‘the mellow gold of liquid honey.’” Different black and white numbers can even have a color. For Asher, five plus two equals the color green. Only recently have scientists proved that these experiences are not the result of an overly active imagination. Shown above on the left part of the picture is a type of test that was used to prove that a synesthete’s ability is real. The average person would be hard pressed to quickly identify all the number twos in the picture, but for a synesthete, the task is easy as the numbers take on different colors. When scientists noted that synesthetes completed the task significantly faster than others, they new that this remarkable conceptual ability did exist. Brain scans are verifying these results.

The interesting thing is that: “A new survey by Grossenbacher found that out of 84 synesthetes, 26 were professional artists, writers or musicians, and 44, serious amateurs.”

Even more intriguing is that a synesthete who has been blind for 10 years says that he sees colors when he hears certain words. And, brain scans confirm that key color-processing areas of the brain are being activated.

Discovery.com has a story entitled “The Truth About Color-Seers,” talks about synesthetes also. They describe an experiment in which a large mess of numbers with the number two forming a picture was shown to synesthetes and non-synesthetes. Synesthetes immediately recognized the picture because it stuck out as a different color.

Creatine and ‘brain power’???

Creatine has long been associated with muscle growth, but recently, the Royal Society journal Proceedings B had a publication that showed that “Creatine supplementation gave a significant measurable boost to brain power.” “The researchers found that subjects’ ability to remember long numbers improved from a number length of approximately seven digits, to an average of 8.5. Dr Rae believes that the creatine increases the amount of energy available to the brain for computational tasks, improving general mental ability.” However, there is no evidence that the mental performance boosts are long-lasting. “Dr Rae said: ‘Creatine supplementation may be of use to those requiring boosted mental performance in the short term - for example university students.’”

Creatine is a natural supplement that is found in muscle tissue. I’m not sure of the exact numbers, but to get the equivalent of 5g of creatine, you would need to eat over 10lbs of steak or take a couple of pills.

If I was conducting this test, I would round up a bunch of weight lifters and compare their IQ to that of the general public. They should be smarter, right?

Simpsons Fan Creates Real Tomacco Plant

What do you get when you graft a tomato plant and a tobacco plant? That’s right, tomacco! Scientists think (but have not tested it yet) that the tomato would contain nicotine. Would this finally be a way to cause people to eat their vegetables? I’m not so sure. From some research Google Search, it appears that nicotine does occur naturally in certain vegetables. Why then isn’t everyone addicted? The New England Journal of Medicine published this article: More on the Nicotine Content of Vegetables and the Arthritis Nightshades Research Foundation released this report entitled Nicotine in Vegetables by Dr. Norman F. Childers.

Report was originally found on Slashdot, but the source article for that was found on The Simpons Channel.

Galileo to finally be laid to rest. Finally, after traveling 2.8 billion miles on journey to Jupiter and its moons, Galileo was directed to crash into Jupiter so that it would not accidentally crash into Europa and “spoil” Europa with MicroVAX that may have hitched a ride from Earth. Galileo was running low on fuel and NASA scientists wanted to purposely crash it into Jupiter where it would be burned up upon entry before they lost communication. Galileo had used what is called a Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter gravitational slingshot to reach Jupiter in (1995, I think). It reached speeds of around 110,000 MPH, or fast enough that it could travel from New York to Los Angeles in 83 seconds.

Some people claimed that Galileo’s nuclear reactor core would turn Jupiter into a star. According to the website, “NASA Is Taking an Titanic Risk.” “If Jupiter ignites, it may throw out a portion of its atmosphere in a shockwave as most starting stars do. This starting star however will then be too close for comfort. A portion of that shockwave will then hit Earth too, its results will be beyond imagination. Millions of tons of hot hydrogen will impact the atmosphere hitting it with 1000 km per second. It will result in an ELE category event at best due to intense global aurora and a bombardment of X-rays everywhere that may last for days to weeks. The survivors will be sterile or die from all kinds of radiation-induced diseases.” But Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy explains point by point why Galileo’s plutonium (Pu239) would never explode like a bomb or ignite Jupiter into a star.

Live in Los Angeles or another huge metropolitan area? Do you find yourself stuck in 8 lanes of traffic with the A/C on because the car exhaust is too overwhelming with the windows down? Then you might want to get an electric commuter car. Currently, the two best, or actually, the only two high performance ones that I know of are: The Tango and The TZero. Previous electric cars had slow acceleration despite structural changes to make the car as light as possible to get the most oomph from the motor. These electric cars can travel two abreast on a standard highway and weigh as much as a Toyota Camry. Acceleration is very quick as both cars 0-60 MPH time is around 4 seconds! I’m not sure about the TZero, but the Tango holds two people and can fit 4 of these cars in the standard size parallel parking spot. Also, their top speed is over 120 MPH and stability is great since the center of gravity is low to the ground. The TZero page even shows the results of it versus Ferraris, Corvettes, and Porsches: You guessed it, the TZero beats these high performance cars in a 6500 foot race way.