.: Above The Aether :.

I will be attending the Maker Faire in Austin, TX later this month.  I’m most excited by the catapult competition as well as the vast concentration of nerdery that will no doubt overpower my senses with bad science jokes. I plan on taking my laptop and camera so I can post some photos of the [...]

From Wired …a team of Duke University and Cambridge researchers has now outlined a new twist on the theory, in which a fast-spanning black hole might shed some of the natural shields that keep scientists from observing it directly, becoming what they call a “naked” singularity. Link -Dave

From the NY Times It sounds like the plot for a scary B-movie: Germs go into space on a rocket and come back stronger and deadlier than ever. Except, it really happened. The germ: Salmonella, best known as a culprit of food poisoning. The trip: Space Shuttle STS-115, September 2006. The reason: Scientists wanted to [...]

The Coconut Crab is the largest anthropod in the world, weighing in a 8-10lbs with legs up to a yard long.  It is named for its ability to crack coconuts with its claws. Yeah.  I know.  It freaked me out too. I picture a husband standing in the doorway, white as a ghost, after trying [...]

Shuttle mission = $1.3 Billion/flight Bottle of Jack Daniels = $35/bottle Having balls busted by national news media = Priceless (The above photo ws taken at NASA in Houston, TX in 2005 inside the Space Shuttle trainer. This is actually pretty cool. From what I’ve been told, the general public is not allowed to actually [...]

From Discover Magazine: Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our [...]

A gym in Hong Kong has come up with a brilliant idea.  Hook up all those treadmills, stairmasters and bicycles to generators and store all of that “free” energy that people are creating in the gym to help power the building. Link to Treehugger article. “Mr Chang, can you please pick up the pace?  The [...]

Russian-controlled computers on the international space station were rebooted today. These computers control frivolous things like oxygen and water and seem to be limping along now. Insert random Microsoft Windows joke here. Read the whole story here. -Dave

From PhysOrg: A team from MIT’s Department of Physics, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future. The team members are Andre Kurs, Aristeidis Karalis, Robert Moffatt, Prof. Peter Fisher, and Prof. John Joannopoulos (Francis Wright Davis [...]

Striving to devolve our population one field trip at a time, the Creationist Museum, located in Petersberg, Kentucky presents “the facts” in a very quotable way.  Here’s a quote from their “About Us” page. We’ll begin the Museum experience by showing that “facts” don’t speak for themselves (click here for a proposed drawing of this [...]