Auroras look amazing when you are gazing up into the night sky, so imagine how they look from space. You don’t have to, actually, because the folks at Science at NASA have put together this little video for us. There should be some great Aurora displays coming up in the next few years, since the sunspot cycle peaks in 2013.
The 2012 USA Science & Engineering Festival will be taking place April 28th and 29th all over the country, with a specific focus at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. There will be a ton of stage performances from a host of people and organizations, and a lot of things happening outside the scope of the time and location of the event proper, such as the Rockville Science Day gathering.
The Higgs Boson is often referred to as the God Particle for the simple reason that once they find and understand it, it could literally open the universe for us. The first video is Professor Michio Kaku giving a very brief introduction to the concept, and why the discovery is important. They came very close in December, and the actual discovery is expected, or at least hoped for, this year. The second video goes into a bit of additional detail on the concept of the Higgs Boson, which interacts with all but three other particles. Which means the discovery and direct observation of the Higgs could give us the key to the ToE (Theory of Everything) that Einstein spent his last 30 years working on, and pretty much every physicist since has taken a crack at. The key to time travel, FTL travel, as well as access to higher dimensions and parallel universes, this discovery could be the game changer that brings the future alive.
Luc Besson is putting together a new science fiction film, and judging by the trailer it is going to be kick ass. Considering what he did with The Fifth Element, Transporter, and Leon, The Professional I am expecting something special. The plot is reminiscent of Escape From New York, in that a convicted (but not actually guilty) prisoner is offered his freedom if he can go to a completely lawless area and rescue a politically valuable hostage. This time around the crime he was accused of was espionage, the hostage is the president’s daughter, and the lawless place is a prison taken over by criminals so dangerous that they put it in orbit so they couldn’t escape. And doesn’t Guy Pearce look all Pliskin-like in the questioning scene? And look who’s asking the questions… this should be out in 2012, I am looking forward to it.
This video is a very good explanation of the most dangerous virus released so far. The sad part is, your tax dollars may have paid for it, depending on where you live. And if you do live there, don’t be surprised when it comes home to roost, as all such things do. Having a good way to leave the planet might be useful when that happens, so hopefully any government that would build and unleash such a thing would be funding its space program well into the future, to protect its citizens.
Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.
There have never been that many moments of actual footage of Jupiter videos or individual photos of the planet, because no physical camera has ever returned from there for us to develop the film. But this compilation of digital images returned to Earth over the last handful of decades and assembled by some of the more skillful editors at NASA gives you a taste of what is going on out there, and I for one would love to get a closer look.