The Great Moonbuggy Race took place Friday and Saturday, in the shadows of model shuttles and rockets at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The weather cooperated swimmingly for the Great Moonbuggy Race in Huntsville, Alabama on Saturday.
The moonbuggies, not always.
It’s challenging, after all, to model a craft after lunar rovers — combining featherweight gear with the durability to withstand craters, gravel pits and undulating erosional features called rills. Teams from high schools and colleges across the United States and even beyond our borders rose to the challenge. Most of the crafts ended up looking like quad-cycles, but between them were plenty of subtle structural differences so that some teams flew through the course at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center — and others barely managed to carry their beleaguered vehicles across the half-mile track.
I spent a few hours cruising the course, talking to the teams and chronicling some of their finer moments — along with their frustrating ones. Check out the photos, and enjoy the ride!
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Jackdaws, with eyes more like people than other birds, seem to be able to follow the human gaze and learn from it. Credit: John Haslam from Dornoch, Scotland
“Bird brain” might not be the worst insult you can hurl at someone.
It turns out birds notice and can respond to the human gaze. Hand-raised jackdaws (relatives of crows, ravens and jays) were found in a study to avoid food if an unfamiliar person was looking at it, thought to be a response to competition. But if an experimenter encouraged the birds toward food reward by looking at it intermittently, the birds took the clue.
And by that measure, the birds seem smarter than dogs and even chimps, which can pick up on other body language cues, like head orientation, but not as much on where people are actually looking.
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Thanks to research on zebrafish, scientists now understand the normal function of the prion proteins that, when maligned, cause brain-wasting diseases.
Surely I’m not alone in those moments when the burger is a little too pink, and I’m thinking: this could be the one. This could be the burger that’s harboring those mysterious little prions, and they’ll worm their way into my brain and start eating. I’ll forget things, insignificant, random things at first, as the little buggers munch increasingly big holes … until eventually I’ll be — well, dead.
If there’s good news, it’s that my understanding of the disease process has been flawed. Prion diseases don’t actually involve an eating of the brain. (Where did I even get that?) Prion diseases begin when a normal protein misfolds, and then replicates like crazy in the brain, eventually choking out whole neurons. Prions are linked to transmissible “spongiform” encephalopathies (brain diseases) including Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans, scrapie in sheep, and mad cow disease in cattle. “Spongiform” because that’s what the brain looks like — a sponge — in a person who has died, usually within a couple of months.
The diseases are thought to be rare. Unless prions are lurking in the brains of a lot of beef-eaters (that’s my fear; prions can be dormant for decades), about one person in a million will get a prion-caused disease. Some people get it from contaminated Human Grown Hormone, some from eating infected animals. In some cases, the ailment will arise within the infected person, either from a genetic mutation or because a normal protein simply went awry.
Until now, scientists haven’t known why prion proteins are produced by our bodies in the first place. Previous experiments in genetically modified mice had failed to yield conclusive evidence, as animals lacking prion proteins seemed perfectly healthy. But a study on a little fish, published earlier this month in the open access journal PLoS ONE, has finally revealed a clue about prion protein’s role.
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Pluto (left) and its moon Charon, from www.solarsysteminfo.ca
I saw a few great April Fool’s jokes today, but this one at NASA Watch really got the prize:
“Pluto is Now Just a Fairly Large Rock”
With perfect mock-serious delivery, blog author Keith Cowing reported it like straight news — given the growing number of solar system bodies in Pluto’s neighborhood, the beleaguered little former planet really isn’t even deserving of “dwarf planet” status any more.
He even made up an official-sounding quote from the International Astronomical Union, astronomy’s official naming body: “Based on new observational evidence of more objects of significant size in the outer solar system, Pluto will no longer be described as a dwarf planet,” said David Perel, chair of the IAU’s Committee on Designations. “We will be meeting to consider a permanent name for the category of objects that Pluto falls under. In the meantime, we are describing it with the working label of ‘FLR’ (Fairly Large Rock).”
He almost had me going for a while there! But I knew it was a fake when he announced NASA’s plans to re-route the New Horizons mission, which has already reached Saturn on its way to Pluto: “Considering the relative scientific merits and the value to the public, New Horizons will now be reprogrammed to orbit Mars,” said Nick Denton, acting deputy assistant associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Cowing’s excellent blog (even when he’s being serious) is here. Other great April Fool’s stories included Nancy’s Atkinson’s leg-puller at Universe Today, Galaxy Zoo Team Discovers New Class of Galaxy Cluster, and the annual holiday spoof at the (Flagstaff) Arizona Daily Sun newspaper, City treasures auctioned. Talk about laughing in the face of adversity! Finally, National Geographic News put together a fun and enlightening photo gallery of four historic science hoaxes.
And now, for something real. NASA announced today that the Sun is at an unexpected new low in its cycle of activity, as measured by sunspots. It’s normal for the Sun to go through sunspot cycles, usually on an 11-year scale. We’ve hit the bottom right on time. But NASA scientists are surprised at how quiet the Sun has been over the past year or so — quieter than at any time in the past century, one expert says.
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They look like a happy couple, but she's got a pretty big secret ... Image courtesy of Kenji Matsuura
Termite kings are fine for fathering the workers, but when it comes to producing daughters, the queen‘s got it under control, thanks …
That’s the new finding from researchers in Raleigh, North Carolina and Japan, embellished with my romantic cynicism.
Scientifically speaking, here are the goods: the researchers have shown for the first time that it is possible for certain female termite “primary queens” to reproduce both sexually and asexually during their lifetimes. The asexually produced babies mostly grow to be queen successors –- so-called “secondary queens” -– that remain in the termite colony and mate with the king. This produces large broods of babies without the dangers of inbreeding, because the secondary queens have no genes in common with the king.
(But don’t you wonder, just a little, whether this causes any tension for the royal couple?)
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