Here’s a sampling of what you’ll find this week as we get our nerd on: A car that gets 11,000 miles per gallon; Isaac Newton’s apple tree defies gravity; and how much would it cost to build your own Iron Man suit? That, and more, in this week’s edition of News For Nerds! Read the rest of this entry »

Regular visitors to ClubGalahad.com know how fond we are of MSNBC’s monthly photo slideshow called The Month in Space. New visitors will soon find out — and may also soon find themselves with their mouths hanging open in awe.

This month’s slideshow features all kinds of good stuff: a violent solar flare, a strangely villainous moon, a misshapen galaxy, the birth of some very hot stars, and much more. In fact, the more we look at these photos, the more we feel like we need to buy a new camera. That 35mm we got for Christmas back in 2002 seemed pretty cool at the time, but when you compare it to, say, the high-resolution snapshot of a Martian crater (not to mention the most recent vacation photos our friends keep posting on Facebook), it doesn’t seem to match up very well.

So if you’re looking for birthday present ideas for the Club Galahad crew, we’re just sayin’, you could do worse than a $34 million satellite with infrared photographic capabilities.

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If you liked this article, you should also read:

Jumbo Planets Orbit Backward

A Beginner’s Guide to the Solar System

The Best Images from February

A lot of interesting things to toss into the mix this week, including the secret to living to 100, how beautiful women can give a man a heart attack, and letting Darth Vader tell you where to go. It’s all part of this week’s News For Nerds, so c’mon! Let’s get our nerd on!

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A scientific study, and a separate Roper survey, have zeroed in on the secret to living to a ripe old age. The bad news for people like me (and maybe you) is that there’s now evidence that sleep is a big factor. Specifically, getting ten hours of sleep each night could be crucial. Uh-oh…

The May issue of the journal Sleep (aptly named) tells us that people who reach the age of 100 are three times more likely to spend at least ten hours a day sleeping. According to the study, sleep not only re-charges the body, but it also kicks up your immune system. If there’s a bright side, those ten hours might include daytime naps as well. Good luck, I say.

The Roper survey took another approach, and I really like their results. After talking with people who made it to 100, it would appear that a key to long life includes staying in touch with pop culture and technology. That makes sense to me. In fact, almost ten percent of the centenarians say they send text messages or IM, and twelve percent are using iPods. Excellent!

What do you suppose a 102-year-old woman would have on her iPod? Food for thought. Read the rest of this entry »

This week we take a look at the first full face transplant, we wonder if our ancestors were monkeying around with Neanderthals, and the fact that video games might - might! - actually make you smarter. All of that, and more, as we get our nerd on this week in News For Nerds!

Remember when Luke Skywalker got a whole new hand, and it looked as good as new? Well, doctors in Spain have done the same thing…only with a face!

It took a full 24 hours in surgery, but a man just received a new nose, jaw, cheekbones, teeth, and skin. Critically injured in an unspecified accident, the Spaniard (whose identity has been kept secret) underwent psychiatric evaluation prior to the surgery to make sure he would be able to accept a completely new face.

It’s been five years since the accident, and the patient had already undergone nine different surgeries leading up to this. Now he’ll remain hospitalized at least another eight weeks while he re-learns to eat, speak, and smile.

The history of facial reconstruction is fascinating, and this latest development is being watched closely by hospitals around the world. If you’d like to read more, this will take you there. Read the rest of this entry »

It was announced this week that scientists have found ’significant amounts’ of water (in the form of ice) on an asteroid called 24 Themis, which is currently hurtling between Mars and Jupiter. The discovery — which also includes tiny organic molecules not unlike those that may have started life on Earth — has caused a great deal of excitement (and also some head-scratching) in the scientific community.

For one thing, it may help explain where Earth got its water. It has long been accepted that when Earth formed several billion years ago, it was a totally dry, barren place. Sort of like Tucson. One long-standing theory holds that water arrived on Earth via comets, which makes sense until you realize that the chemical composition of the water in comets doesn’t quite match up with the water here on Earth. With this discovery, it seems as though asteroids might be a more likely point of origin.

Of course the discussion doesn’t end there, because the presence of so much ice on 24 Themis blurs the line between what is technically an asteroid and what is a comet. You may recall that we had a similar discussion here last month. We’ll keep you posted as more information becomes available. In the meantime, check out this cool slideshow about asteroids, and then see if you can say the term ‘error ellipsoid’ five times fast.

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If you liked this article, you should also read:

Big Changes in Store for U.S. Space Flight

The Science Behind Galahad: Comets

Fireballs, Asteroids and Meteors, Oh My!

The shuttle Discovery made it safely back to Earth Tuesday, but not before it streaked across much of the continental United States. Curious citizens in places like Montana, Colorado and Oklahoma got a rare glimpse at the returning shuttle after its 15-day mission to the International Space Station.

NASA typically prefers to bring the shuttle back to Kennedy Space Center in Florida via a South Pacific route, but in this case, they wanted to give the astronauts as much time as possible aboard the ISS while still minimizing the amount of fatigue that the astronauts had to endure. The return had already been delayed by one day because of bad weather.

This mission — which re-stocked the ISS with new supplies while bringing home trash and defunct equipment — was the next-to-last mission for the shuttle Discovery, which currently is the oldest in NASA’s fleet. Its last scheduled flight is on track for September.

Think you know a little about the space shuttle? Want to know a little more? Take this short online quiz and see how you stack up against others.

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If you liked this article, you should also read:

A Beginner’s Guide to the Solar System

The Future of U.S. Space Exploration

Big Brain Club Profile: Astronaut Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger

Since President Obama announced last month that he would be making significant changes at NASA, opinions have been split over whether his approach is in our own best interest. Without many actual facts to go on, plenty of folks have lined up over the past few weeks to declare that the President’s new strategy is either bold and brilliant or that it’s dumb and doomed.

Well, on Thursday we got our first look at what the President has in mind for the future of space exploration. Speaking from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Mr. Obama laid out his vision to about 200 attendees and a curious throng of reporters. In short: more overall money to NASA, cancelling a planned return to the moon but adding a trip to Mars and an asteroid, the creation of an escape pod for the International Space Station, outsourcing more work to private companies (instead of government agencies), and, at least in the short term, a loss of jobs in places like Florida and Texas, where the space industry employs many thousands of people.

It is far too soon to know whether the President’s new agenda is going to prove successful or not. There are plenty of awfully smart people who disagree, and they all make pretty good points. But we will say this: in general, we support the ambitious pursuit of new space exploration — provided that it is done the right way, of course.

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If you liked this article, you should also read:

What Can You Learn from a ‘Successful Failure’?

Big Brain Club Profile: Astronaut Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger

President Obama Plans a New Course for NASA

In our solar system, planets orbit the Sun in the same direction as the star’s own rotation. Essentially, the Sun and the planets all spin in the same direction. Makes sense, right?

Well, it turns out that this isn’t always the case in other parts of the universe. Two of the nine new jumbo planets reported by European astronomers this week orbit in the opposite direction of their own star’s rotation. In total, at least six of these ‘backward’ planets have been discovered in recent years, which leads to the question: what gives?

No one is really sure just yet, but these discoveries call into question the current views on precisely how planets and stars get together in the first place. It has long been accepted that planets coalesce around stars as part of a dust disk — but if that’s the case, there’s no good explanation for these ‘backward’ planets with their contrarian orbit.

If you have a theory, we’d love to hear it. NASA probably would, too.

On Sunday, NASA took the unusual step of celebrating a mission that was one of the space agency’s highest-profile failures: Apollo 13.

Forty years ago, an oxygen tank exploded on board Apollo 13 as astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert were on their way to the moon. For five days the world held its breath while the astronauts worked with mission control specialists in Houston to navigate their way back home under the most dangerous circumstances.

If you aren’t familiar with the story — or for that matter, even if you are — you should watch this recent Dateline NBC segment. You can also read Jim Lovell’s book, or watch the wonderfully dramatic movie version starring Tom Hanks.

But that’s all just the set-up for the very important lesson that came out of the Apollo 13 disaster. As Commander Lovell tells it, the mission was a failure in the sense that it didn’t achieve its initial objective of reaching and studying the moon. But, says Lovell, in the end it was “a great success in the ability of people to take an almost certain catastrophe and turn it into a successful recovery.”

The people involved with Apollo 13 took a near-tragedy and turned it into a triumph — they saved the lives of three very important astronauts who were stranded aboard a busted spacecraft hundreds of miles from earth, and they did so under the highest levels of stress imaginable. Think about that the next time a situation starts to collapse in front of you. Isn’t it true that sometimes — maybe not always, but sometimes — if we are dedicated to making the best of a bad situation, we can surprise ourselves by learning what we’re capable of when the pressure is on?

The events that unfolded 40 years ago aboard Apollo 13 have given us many things. They have made NASA better prepared for future missions, and they’ve given us a great movie to watch, for starters. But in celebrating this recent anniversary and in bringing Lovell and Haise back into the spotlight all these years later, they’ve also taught us what it means to experience a ’successful failure,’ and that might be most valuable outcome of all.

Saturn is an interesting planet. It’s big, for one thing — second only to Jupiter within our solar system — and it has that incredibly unique system of rings that distinguish it from its sister planets. But one of the most intriguing things about Saturn has little to do with the planet itself: its moons are attracting more and more attention in the astronomical community, and rightfully so.

In total, Saturn has at least five dozen moons. Its largest moon, Titan, is actually bigger in size than the planet Mercury, and has its own atmosphere. The Cassini probe, launched by NASA in 1997 (in conjunction with the European Space Agency), reached Titan in 2004 and has done a remarkable job of photographing and mapping areas of Titan that have shown it to be surprisingly Earth-like in many ways. For more on the Cassini mission, here’s a very impressive website from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with all sorts of fun, interactive information. You can even take a virtual tour of Cassini, or of Titan.

But even while Titan gets the lion’s share of attention, another of Saturn’s moons, Mimas, is making headlines this week. You can get the full story from our friends at Space.com, but in a nutshell, Cassini has taken some high-resolution, heat-sensitive images that open up a whole new set of questions about Mimas. Better still, fans of retro pop culture (and who isn’t these days?) can get a chuckle over how Mimas looks an awful lot like the infmaous Death Star from Star Wars… or how the infrared images look surprisingly similar to the beloved arcade game Pac-Man.

Check out the pictures, and the story, and judge for yourself. One thing is for sure: we’ll be hearing a lot more from the depths of Saturn’s moons this year. You can bet on it.