Starship Asterisk*

JuanAustin wrote:
Are there any plans to mount a mock mission to deflect 2009 MN4 as if it were going to strike the earth, like a practice-simulation? What better opportunity to plan and execute a global drill! How often does the human race get to practice for the real thing?

bystander wrote:

neufer wrote:
I sincerely doubt that any amphibians are at risk from global warming.

• You may be right, I may be crazy
  But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
  Turn out the light, don't try to save me
  You may be wrong, for all I know, you may be right
  
  • — Billy Joel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross wrote:
<<Albatrosses are among the largest of flying birds, and the great albatrosses (genus Diomedea) have the largest wingspans of any extant birds. The albatrosses are usually regarded as falling into four genera, but there is disagreement over the number of species.

The name albatross is derived from the Arabic al-câdous or al-ġaţţās (a pelican; literally, "the diver"), which travelled to English via the Portuguese form alcatraz ("gannet"), which is also the origin of the name of the former prison, Alcatraz. The word alcatraz was originally applied to the frigatebird; the modification to albatross was perhaps influenced by Latin albus, meaning "white", in contrast to frigatebirds which are black. They were once commonly known as Goonie birds or Gooney birds, particularly those of the North Pacific. In the southern hemisphere, the name mollymawk is still well established in some areas, which is a corrupted form of malle-mugge, an old Dutch name for the Northern Fulmar. The name Diomedea, assigned to the albatrosses by Linnaeus, references the mythical metamorphosis of the companions of the Greek warrior Diomedes into birds. Finally, the name for the order, Procellariiformes, comes from the Latin word procella meaning a violent wind or a storm.

Of the 21 species of albatrosses recognised by the IUCN, 19 are threatened with extinction. Numbers of albatrosses have declined in the past due to harvesting for feathers, but today the albatrosses are threatened by introduced species such as rats and feral cats that attack eggs, chicks and nesting adults; by pollution; by a serious decline in fish stocks in many regions largely due to overfishing; and by long-line fishing. Long-line fisheries pose the greatest threat, as feeding birds are attracted to the bait, become hooked on the lines, and drown.>>

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/08/2104476/scientists-oldest-wild-bird-in.html wrote:
Scientists: Oldest wild bird in US is new mother
The Associated Press

In this Febuary 2011 photo provided by the US Geological
Survey, a Laysan albatross, roughly 60-years-old, named
Wisdom is seen with a chick at the Midway Atoll National
Wildlife Refuge near Hawaii. USGS / AP Photo

HONOLULU -- <<The oldest known wild bird in the U.S. is a new mother. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist spotted the Laysan albatross that's at least 60 years old a few weeks ago. It was with a chick at Midway Atoll, a remote wildlife refuge 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu. A U.S. Geological Survey scientist first banded the seabird as she incubated an egg in 1956. She was estimated to be at least 5 years old at the time. The albatross has since worn out five bird bands.

Bruce Peterjohn, the chief of the North American Bird Banding Program, said the albatross is the oldest wild bird documented by the 90-year-old bird banding program, which is run by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and Canada. "She looks great," Peterjohn said in a news release Tuesday. "To know that she can still successfully raise young at age 60-plus, that is beyond words." The bird, named Wisdom, has likely raised at least 30 to 35 chicks during her life, Peterjohn said.

Albatross lay just one egg a year. But it takes most of a year to incubate and raise a chick, and the seabirds sometimes take a year off from parenting after successfully raising a fledged bird.>>

neufer wrote:I sincerely doubt that any amphibians are at risk from global warming.

• You may be right, I may be crazy
  But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
  Turn out the light, don't try to save me
  You may be wrong, for all I know, you may be right
  
  • — Billy Joel

nstahl wrote:

bystander wrote:

neufer wrote:
Global warming is unlikely to be directly responsible for any known current global extinction.

Many Amphibians would probably disagree.

Not to mention some critters who've been living by/moving up mountain peaks and can't move any higher to stay cool.

NoelC wrote:You really sure about that? An image taken through two different filters at different times might show a moving object in two different colors, depending on how it was put together. Fixed objects - e.g., the stars, would appear less colorful.

Are you thinking every last one of the small streaks are particle hits on the imager? I wonder... Some of them look a little different than most of the others.

I'm assuming the curvature in the main streak is because of the HST's orbital motion.

NoelC wrote:I'm assuming the curvature in the main streak is because of the HST's orbital motion.

bystander wrote: Many Amphibians would probably disagree.

neufer wrote:Global warming is unlikely to be directly responsible for any known current global extinction.

bystander wrote:

neufer wrote:I have NO idea what this particular APOD has to do with global warming
(; not that there's anything wrong with an APOD discussing global warming).]

APOD Robot wrote:One likely result is a global extinction of many species of life, possibly dwarfing the ongoing extinction occurring now.

neufer wrote: There is only ONE asteroid trail: the curved blue one.

neufer wrote:(Predatory bear-like) Artogyon Neuendorffer

nstahl wrote:Thank you! So this image, and presumably the others in the Hubble Archive that have been used to find asteroids, are actually a combination of successive shots, with each shot a long exposure. Any idea how long the exposures are and how far apart in time those successive shots are?

And I take it the streaks are pretty much as they were on the Hubble shot? Maybe only jazzed up a little for more visibility?

neufer wrote:I have NO idea what this particular APOD has to do with global warming
(; not that there's anything wrong with an APOD discussing global warming).]

APOD Robot wrote:One likely result is a global extinction of many species of life, possibly dwarfing the ongoing extinction occurring now.

dp wrote:I hope this site won't go further down this politicized global warming path. It would be such a disappointment to drop yet another interesting science page because of serial CAGW injection that is so out of context and scope.

• `And only one [day] for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!'
  
  `I don't know what you mean by "glory,"' Alice said.
  
  Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. `Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
  
  `But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument,"' Alice objected.
  
  `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
  
  `The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
  
  `The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - - that's all.'
  
  Alice was too much puzzled to say anything

Chris wrote:These images are captured through different filters in successive exposures. Uncalibrated images are full of cosmic ray hits and other anomalies. These are events that happen only in single exposures, so when the frames are combined to produce color images, all the transient stuff (including some or all of the asteroid path) is shown only in a single color, not a properly synthetic color.

BobStein-VisiBone wrote:Blue lines and yellow lines - anyone else wondering what they mean? Are they innies and outies?

peter_from_nyc wrote:How big was the one with the "blue streak"?

Also, it seems to curve, suggesting an ellipse as per Newton's laws. What are its focal points? (What is it orbiting? -- the sun?)

peter_from_nyc wrote:
How big was the one with the "blue streak"?

peter_from_nyc wrote:
Also, it seems to curve, suggesting an ellipse as per Newton's laws. What are its focal points? (What is it orbiting? -- the sun?)

http://www.word-detective.com/2009/02/22/blue-streak/ wrote:
Dear Word Detective: I was wondering if you could help me find the origin of the phrase “blue streak” as in “talk a blue streak” or “curse a blue streak.” The only thing I could find was that it might have something to do with lightning. — Eric.

<<Good question, but before we begin, I would strongly advise against having anything to do with lightning, and I speak from personal experience. Three years ago this month I had a close encounter with ball lightning (yes, it most certainly does exist), and some people say I haven’t been quite right ever since. Apart from a tendency to cry when I eat oatmeal and bark when I’m angry, however, I can’t imagine what they’re talking about. Anyway, lightning is definitely nasty stuff.

Onward. Human beings have identified a wide spectrum of colors (and catalog copywriters are constantly inventing new ones), but when it comes to popular figures of speech, “blue” takes the prize for both number and variety of senses. We speak, for example, of sadness or depression as “the blues,” although no one has ever come up with a convincing explanation why. “Blues” music does often center on depressing “blue” subjects (lover left, dog died, etc.), but that “blue” may actually be a reference to the genre’s use of “blue notes,” halfway between proper scale notes. Elsewhere, “blue blood” is said to signify royalty or high social class, but was originally just a reference to very light skin, which made the oxygen-rich blood in one’s veins visible under the skin. The opposite of the blue-blooded idle rich are, of course, “blue-collar” workers, so-called for the denim shirts that once were standard factory wear.

Some towns in the US still enforce “blue laws” forbidding or restricting certain activities on Sundays, but the origin of the term has been lost in the mists of time along with the Puritans who concocted the laws. And, at the other end of the spectrum, we have the slightly antiquated (but equally mysterious) adjective “blue” meaning “obscene,” which dates to the 1820s (and thus predates “blue movies” by a century). It’s possible, however, that “blue” in the “porn” sense arose from the term “blue laws” being generalized to mean any kind of censorious legislation.

Meanwhile, as the stock exchange tumbles and staid “blue chip” stocks take a beating, it’s appropriate to note that “blue chip” meaning “top rank, best” comes from the highest denomination chips in the very un-staid game of poker, which are traditionally blue.

All of which brings us to “blue streak,” which means “with great intensity or speed” and originated in the US in the early 18th century. In all likelihood, the term did arise by analogy to the speed and force of a bolt of lightning, especially in “talk a blue streak,” meaning to speak rapidly and excitedly. The “blue” in “curse a blue streak” probably also invokes “blue” in the sense of “obscene.” A similar phrase, “blue blazes” (“And the two Jacobs swore like blue blazes agin him,”1858), was originally a reference to the fires of Hell, where it is said that brimstone burns with a pale blue flame.>>

In fact, one was discovered in 1998 as the long blue streak in the above archival image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

BobStein-VisiBone wrote:
Blue lines and yellow lines - anyone else wondering what they mean? Are they innies and outies?

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1998/10/image/a/ wrote:

Click to view full size image

Astronomers Karl Stapelfeldt and Robin Evans have tracked down about 100 small asteroids by hunting through more than 28,000 archival images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Here is a sample of what they have found: four archival images that show the curved trails left by asteroids.

[Top left]: Hubble captured a bright asteroid, with a visual magnitude of 18.7, roaming in the constellation Centaurus. Background stars are shown in white, while the asteroid trail is depicted in blue at top center. The trail has a length of 19 arc seconds. This asteroid has a diameter of one and one-quarter miles (2 kilometers), and was located 87 million miles from Earth and 156 million miles from the Sun. Numerous orange and blue specks in this image and the following two images were created by cosmic rays, energetic subatomic particles that struck the camera's detector.

[Top right]: Here is an asteroid with a visual magnitude of 21.8 passing a galaxy in the constellation Leo. The trail is seen in two consecutive exposures, the first shown in blue and the second in red. This asteroid has a diameter of half a mile (0.8 kilometers), and was located 188 million miles from Earth and 233 million miles from the Sun.

[Lower left]: This asteroid in the constellation Taurus has a visual magnitude of 23, and is one of the faintest seen so far in the Hubble archive. It moves from upper right to lower left in two consecutive exposures; the first trail is shown in blue and the second in red. Because of the asteroid's relatively straight trail, astronomers could not accurately determine its distance. The estimated diameter is half a mile (0.8 kilometers) at an Earth distance of 205 million miles and a Sun distance of 298 million miles.

[Lower right]: This is a broken asteroid trail crossing the outer regions of galaxy NGC 4548 in Coma Berenices. Five trail segments (shown in white) were extracted from individual exposures and added to a cleaned color image of the galaxy. The asteroid enters the image at top center and moves down toward the lower left. Large gaps in the trail occur because the telescope is orbiting the Earth and cannot continuously observe the galaxy. This asteroid has a visual magnitude of 20.8, a diameter of one mile (1.6 kilometers), and was seen at a distance of 254 million miles from Earth and 292 million miles from the Sun.>>

moonstruck wrote:
Wow, that's scary. I guess the ones coming straight at us won't leave a trail. They'll just get bigger. Ugh!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastornis wrote:

Gastornis/Diatryma : an extinct flightless bird

---

<<Gastornis (formerly known as Diatryma), is an extinct genus of large flightless bird that lived during the late Paleocene and Eocene epochs of the Cenozoic. It was named in 1855, after Gaston Planté, who had discovered the first fossils in Argile Plastique formation deposits at Meudon near Paris (France). In the 1870s, the famous American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope discovered another, more complete set of fossils in North America, and named them Diatryma (from Greek διάτρημα meaning "canoe").

Gastornis parisiensis measured on average 1.75 metres tall, but large individuals grew up to 2 metres tall. The Gastornis had a remarkably huge beak with a slightly hooked top, which was taken as evidence suggesting that it was carnivorous. At its time, the environment in which Gastornis lived in had large portions of dense forest and a moist to semiarid subtropical or even tropical climate. North America and Europe were still rather close, and especially since Greenland probably was covered with lush woodland and grassland then, only narrow straits of a few 100 km at most would have blocked entirely landbound dispersal of the Gastornis ancestors. While there were large contiguous areas of land in their North American range after the Western Interior Seaway had receded, their European range was an archipelago due to the Alpide orogeny and the high sea levels of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Classically, Gastornis has been depicted as predatory. However, with the size of Gastornis legs, the bird would have had to have been more agile to catch fast-moving prey than the fossils suggest it to have been. Consequently, it has been suspected that Gastornis was an ambush hunter and/or used pack hunting techniques to pursue or ambush prey; if Gastornis was a predator, it would have certainly needed some other means of hunting prey through the dense forest.

Similar gigantic birds of the Cenozoic were the South American terror birds (phorusrhacids) and the Australian mihirungs (Dromornithidae). The former were certainly carnivorous, and the latter are suspected of being predators, too. Gastornis were among the largest, if not the largest birds alive during the Paleogene. They had few natural enemies and serious competitors apart from other Gastornis or then-rare large mammals, such as the predatory bear-like Arctocyon of Europe. If these huge birds were active hunters, they must have been important apex predators that dominated the forest ecosystems of North America and Europe until the middle Eocene. The mid-Eocene saw the rise of large creodont and mesonychid predators to ecological prominence in Eurasia and North America; the appearance of these new predators coincides with the decline of Gastornis and its relatives. This was possibly due to an increased tendency of mammalian predators to hunt together in packs. The fact that no birds appear to have ever weighed much more than half a metric ton suggests that they were restricted in their ability to evolve to larger and larger sizes, and thus in their ability to out-evolve apex predators by sheer bulk as mammals are often able to do.>>

moonstruck wrote:Wow, that's scary. I guess the ones coming straight at us won't leave a trail. They'll just get bigger. Ugh!