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Museum Day, National Science festival

Today, September 25th, is Museum Day; the museums you can find from that Smithsonian locator link are all free to the public today. All you have to do is download a ticket, print it out, and take it with you to get free access for two adults to any one of hundreds of museums coast to coast. Which should be a good warm up for next month’s event…

This one looks very interesting; from October 10th to the 24th this year the USA Science & Engineering Festival will take place in the Washington, D.C. area. Billing itself as the the country’s first national science festival, it already has over 500 organizations signed up to participate, and will end with a two day Expo in the nation’s capital. This event will give science & engineering groups the opportunity to present themselves to the public with hands-on science activities to inspire the next generation of researchers and developers. The teams involved are wide ranging, and include such diverse outfits and events as the 4H National Youth Science Day, the You Can Do The Cube competition, a presentation from Hollywood Movie Physics, and the Versatile Mr. Freeze from FermiLabs, to name but a few. And yes, you can follow them on a boatload of social media tools, including Twitter.

Science Festival this fall

This one looks very interesting; from October 10th to the 24th this year the USA Science & Engineering Festival will take place in the Washington, D.C. area. Billing itself as the the country’s first national science festival, it already has over 500 organizations signed up to participate, and will end with a two day Expo in the nation’s capital according to their official blog. This event will give science & engineering groups the opportunity to present themselves to the public with hands-on science activities to inspire the next generation of researchers and developers. The teams involved are wide ranging, and include such diverse outfits and events as the 4H National Youth Science Day, the You Can Do The Cube competition, a presentation from Hollywood Movie Physics, and the Versatile Mr. Freeze from FermiLabs, to name but a few. And yes, you can follow them on a boatload of social media tools, including Twitter.

Hadron Rock

Sometimes you just have to go with the Boson Sonata or its nearest equivalent. The folks at the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN particle physics research center (near Geneva) have come up with an interesting tool. The SOUNDS OF SCIENCE project has been building towards the goal of converting the pathtracks of the particles into soundtracks that can then be used creatively. This takes massive computing power, but gives results never before seen or heard. Thanks to Reuters for the heads-up on this one!

Mars Water and Mars Movie

Yes, this is a geek post; deal with it! One of the major results the various Mars orbiters and rovers have been trying to work out is whether or not the red planet has ever harbored life, and one of the preconditions of life is a water supply. At least our kind of carbon based life, and there are good reasons why two planets in the same solar system would bear the same flavor of life. The most obvious two are:

1) Our planets condensed out of the same orbital dust cloud around our condensing star, and are therefore made from the same ratio of elements at the same stellar evolution stage, and

2) High speed impacts on either planet by rocks with enough kinetic energy to blast objects beyond escape velocity will tend to include any organic building blocks. Some percentage of those ejecta will end up raining down on the other planet, thereby sharing enzymes, RNA, DNA, and other life building structures between bio-zones.

With that as a given, it is exciting to find out they now have the evidence that Mars had water, enough to completely reshape the planet and generate clay deposits, as recently as 4 billion years ago. Since life on this planet started evolving 5 billion years ago, we had a clear billion years to cross-pollinate.

But there is one more detail that gave me the biggest grin of all about this; Did you notice that in each article the scientist reporting the Mars results was named after the ERB character John Carter of Mars? Is this going to impact on the movie? I am ready for that film!

Been Through the Wormhole?

If you haven’t caught it yet, I would like to recommend a TV program called Through the Wormhole on the Science Channel, one of the Discovery Channel subsets. The host is Morgan Freeman, and the topics range through the tough questions that have always faced mankind, for which we now have enough science to begin to approach an answer. It airs on Wednesday evenings, and here is a sample to get you started…