Is the solar system tilted sideways??

Do you ever think about how cool it is that someone on the opposite side of the earth from you is standing "upside down"--your feet facing their feet?

Or even when you travel from one US coast to another, you are standing at a ~45 degree tilt relative to how you were standing before.

I had thoughts like this swirling in my head during one moonless night on the pacific coast, as the campfire died down and our very own milky way galaxy came into view.

Rosetta: Languages and Space Probes

Linguists estimate that around 50% of the worlds languages will go extinct by the end of this century (ref). Just as John Hammond used the the DNA preserved in ancient dino-hungry mosquitoes to revive extinct dinosaurs in Jurassic Park...

...future generations may use the information encoded on a three inch disk, known as a Rosetta disk, to bring long-dead languages back to life. At least that's the idea. The Rosetta disk project was hatched by people at the Long Now Foundation, who used technology developed at Los Alomos National labs to miniaturize 13,500 pages of text from over 1,500 human languages onto a three inch disk of nickel. I like to think about these disks as language time capsules.

The teaser-side of a Rosetta disk. via the Long Now Foundation.

Asteroid Particles

Recently the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency sent a spaceship to an asteroid named Itokawa.  A spaceship to an asteroid!!  As if that wasn't awesome enough, the spaceship landed on the asteroid, collected material, and returned home to earth!  These are images of tiny particles collected from the surface of that asteroid.

These particles are around half the diameter of a human hair.  Click to make them HUGE!

Here are three views of Itokawa, which is about 630 meters x 250 meters.  Assuming a spacesuit didn't slow you down, and the surface of the asteroid were boulder-free and easy to walk on, it would only take you ~20 minutes to walk around the whole thing the long-way.  Pretty small!!

"Barely Bad Bananas" or "Where Does Background Radiation Come From???"

The totally normal banana that this totally normal monkey is eating is radioactive, but so is the monkey!

Radioactive Monkey Eating Radioactive Banana, from Arne Bevaart

Solar Beat

File this post under my constant quest to rise above the constraints of my perception of time and space.  The people at whitevinyldesign.com made this awesome little animation thing of the eight "classical planets" plus the "pluton" (formerly known as a planet) pluto and the "dwarf planet" (formerly known as an asteroid) ceres orbiting around the sun.  You can speed them up and slow them down and listen to their 10 unique tones.  I seriously spaced out for 10 solid minutes while watching this thing, I encourage you to do the same.

via whitevinyldesign.com via Krulwich wonders

Isn't it cool how the innermost planets move soooooooo much faster than the outermost planets?  Makes me think of how a penny circles faster and faster around the central axis of one of those spiral wishing wells as it gets closer to the center.  Conceptually identical.

the moon dude, the moon

Unfortunately right now the moon is waning (each night less area visible from earth is illuminated by the sun).

But once the moon comes back in all its glory, you should go outside and stare at it for a while. I am serious. You should try do this as much as possible, it can be kind of like meditation, which might improve your health.

Forty years ago the first chunks of living, conscious earth matter purposefully moved themselves from their home of the past 4.6 billion years to personally investigate and witness the earth's long-time companion, the moon.  The little astronauts and their little ship, which you can think of as little tiny particles of the earths' crust--earth particles, traveled over 200,000 miles! In absolute vacuum!! What were those earth particles thinking???!!! So dangerous! (p.s. I'm mega jealous). Now, in case you didn't go outside and stare at it yet, here is a high-quality picture of the moon (click for bigger picture):

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Today we're going to talk about what you can see and can't see when you look up into the night sky. Let's see where it takes us.

Step outside tonight and gaze into the heavens. Almost all of the lights you see up there are stars that are in our very own milky way galaxy. If you're like me, you live in a city and can't see but a handful of stars. So, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, here is what the sky looks like from the middle of the desert (definitely click on this to see the big version, definitely).