Kate Rauner's Blog, page 34

On My Way to Mars ? Sort Of #NASA #Mars

[image error]The spousal unit just sent me my boarding pass. A cute way to travel with NASA on Mars 2020, but I’ll have to bring my own life support.

Is Your Garden Fading into Autumn? Here’s a Book to Feed Your Fantasies for Next Year #gardening #gardendesign #homegrown #recipes #giftguide

[image error]Magnificent photos, fantastic tips, recipes – it’s time to bring back simple gardening pleasures. Here in the northern hemisphere, our gardens are moving into autumn. Harvest festivals dot the weekend landscape.

It’s time to reap the rewards of your summer efforts and dream of next spring. Will you plant melons? What variety? Can you save seeds from this year’s crop?

Here is a magnificent book on melons! The photos are worth the price alone, but there’s a lot more. Picking and choosing, gardening tips, how to save seeds, recipes, and an amazing array of varietal descriptions. It’s a Number 1 New Release in Vegetable Gardening on Amazon.

The Melon is a perfect gift for the gardener in your life. In addition to melons, Amy Goldman is the author to know if you’re interested in heirloom tomates, squash, and more historic garden treasures. And there, in the chapter titled Watermelon Portraits, you’ll find my ode to the ancestral desert watermelon. I’m honored to contribute to such a thoroughly wonderful book.

For our friends downunder, here’s the inspiration for starting your summer garden. Who could resist planting melons after reading this book?

Looking for Science Fiction? Download One or All of These Before Oct 9th #sciencefiction #ebook

[image error] If you’re looking for science fiction – short stories, previews, and full novels – here are 45 stories to download for free. Lots of different authors – maybe your new favorite is right here

Cosmic Event Coming Soon… Maybe – there’s always a maybe! #astronomy #stars #space #telescope

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Cygnus

KIC 9832227 is a binary star in the constellation Cygnus, and it’s about to explode.

Most statements like that about cosmic events then go on to say “in a billion years” or something similar. Time is different for you and me versus the universe.

Not KIC 9832227! The two stars are:

likely to merge into a single star in the year 2022 and create an explosive event called a red nova that should be visible to the naked eye.

The stars are currently orbiting so close to one another that they’re actually touching and sharing a single atmosphere. They’re spinning faster and faster and getting closer together.

We should see KIC 9832227 brighten to a magnitude 2 (about as bright as Polaris) for about six months. The exact timing is projected to be 2022.2 ±.6. From Brian Dunn, skeptoid.com

Sigh. There’s a “maybe.” Wikipedia, those spoilsports, say this date is unlikely because of some variations in stellar movements that we don’t understand well.

It seems that I’ll find out who’s right soon enough.

NASA’s Dragonfly to Explore Titan, a Really Weird Moon #NASA #dragonfly #Saturn #explore

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Artist’s image of Dragonfly as it lands and explores Titan

If you’re a fan of exploring the solar system, you’ve heard of the nuclear powered, $1 billion dollar spacecraft, Dragonfly.

Elizabeth Turtle, the mission’s principle investigator at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, insists that this is actually a pretty tame space probe, as these things go. “There’s not a lot of new technology.”

If Dragonfly sounds like a crazy spacecraft, consider that Titan is a crazy moon, unlike any other moon or planet in the solar system. Though a little bit like Earth. It has lakes and rain.

The largest moon of Saturn, it has dunes, mountains, gullies and even rivers and lakes — though on Titan, it’s so cold the lakes are filled with liquid methane, not water.

Titan has one more feature that’s worth noting: Although its mainly nitrogen atmosphere is denser than Earth’s, its gravity is far lower. That makes it the perfect place to take to the skies. npr.org

Launch is still years away, but you can travel to Titan today, in scifi. I couldn’t resist sending a colony to the sold, deadly moon. But Fynn’s fellow colonists may be the greatest danger. Read it today.

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Fynn learns the Kin’s secret when he’s shoved into a stasis pod. He’s going to colonize Titan with his father’s cult. Can they build a paradise? Not likely! Click now to find the book at Amazon. Kindle Unlimited too!

 

Weird Deep Sea Jellyfish – It’s Hard to Come Up With Weirder Scifi

Real life is a great inspiration. My colony on Saturn’s moon Titan has it’s own ghost. Maybe Deepstaria will inspire more ideas in upcoming Book 2. Visit the deadly-cold moon for a read.

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Fyn learns his father’s secret when he’s shoved into a stasis pod. They’re going to Saturn’s moon, Titan – Click now to go to Amazon for a preview

What Happened to the Boys? In Fossilization, That Is #fossil #nature #unexpected

[image error]This is a weird discovery. In museum fossils of ancient megafauna, males outnumber females by at least two to one. Assuming ancient mammals are pretty much like mammals today, the ratio at birth should be close to 50/50, so why do paleontologists dig up more boys than girls?

Bison, mammoths, bears. Museums hold more male bones than female (something determined by measuring bones and sometimes by sampling DNA)

They found the same bias in all but a few mammalian orders, with bats, sloths, and anteaters among the exceptions. atlasobscura.com

No one set out to study sex discrepancies in fossil collections, but there it is. One hypothesis suggests that males are driven out of herds or forced to hunt over a larger area than females, end up dying in a wider variety of places, and that would favor preservation. But, since 100% of mammals die, it’s still kinda weird.

Thanks to the Swedish Museum of Natural History paper in Current Biology and to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chandrayaan is Proof that We’ll See India on the Moon Soon #rocket #chandrayaan2 #spec #india #indiaonthemoon

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The red line is perfectly on target. About a mile above the surface something went wrong.

I want to both console and congratulate the team behind Chandrayaan 2. Congratulations because they’ve achieve so much, and condolences because, right now, none of that feels like it matters.

India is making great strides in space and this lander was so, so close. It looked so, so good right up to the last few seconds. I haven’t forgotten that the path to the moon was not smooth for America.

Good luck in the future. We’ll see you on the moon.

Methane Dragon Sleeps in the Deep #poem #poetry #methane #oceans

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Tube worms – one of the larger deep ocean critters

Microbial mats

Set the table

With poisonous sulfides

For those that are able.

Beyond sandy shores,

More hitchhiking beasts

Find methane gas

A sumptuous feast.

How odd to discover

These gases are forming

In deep ocean cold

To drive global warming.

The dragon sleeps,

Its bubbling snores

Provide the incentive

To learn something more.

by Kate Rauner

Thanks to huffpost.com

Dropping Nuclear Bomb into a Hurricane is a Bad Idea #hurricane #hurricaneseason

Do you have a sneaking suspicion that dropping a nuclear bomb into a hurricane is a bad idea? Why did we ban above ground testing? Fallout!

Since the 1950s, the idea has come up often during hurricane season. Could we mere humans change the course of a hurricane?

If you want our greatest and scariest tool to seem small, consider that

The heat release of a hurricane is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes… Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a chance to grow into hurricanes isn’t promising either. BBC

But both regular folk and scientists have considered this idea. Maybe nuking hurricanes isn’t such an obviously bad idea. An above-ground nuclear blast lifts a massive column of air and debris many many miles into the air.

Because the “nuke a hurricane” myth won’t die, NOAA maintains a web page exclusively devoted to debunking this proposal. NatGeo

Sincere people with honest questions have asked about this. Thank you, NOAA, for your response. Science ought to answer questions from regular people. If you’re interested, take a look at the NOAA web page.