Starship Asterisk*

Chris Peterson wrote: No. We're here because if we weren't, we wouldn't be. Nothing to do with odds.

So, I take it that you're not a fan of the Drake Equation.

Unfortunately, it's an idea with about as much scientific evidence as the suggestion that the Universe is sitting on an infinite stack of turtles... I watched a documentary on the science channel , Through the Wormhole, I believe, in which a theoretical physicist or cosmologist, I'm not sure which,...

Perhaps we'll get an explanation here. I thought that non-uniformity of the cosmos is what allowed stars to form in the first place. How did they determine what the criteria are for an "anomalously large area of high density"?

The actual title. Discoveries from Planck may mean rethinking how the universe began . Recently, scientists on the Planck team announced finding certain large-scale features on the CMB sky that they cannot explain. One of them: a large cold spot, which corresponds to an anomalously large area of hig...

geckzilla wrote:That's a jumping spider.

Or a Koala? I know, that's stretching it.

<<Robert Hooke FRS (28 July [O.S. 18 July] 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath. Hooke's law is a principle of physics that states that the force F needed to extend or compress a spring by some distance X is proportional to that distance. That is, http://u...

neufer wrote:

owlice wrote:
Well, now it does!

Then you might correct Otto's typo as well.

Since Otto appears to be a backup, lets hope the primary doesn't fail.

Well, i must say I'm enjoying all the clues, even though i don't have a clue as to what they're trying to clue me in on. I just went through Wikipedia's description of James Joyce and couldn't find anything relevant to anything, that i could recognize as being relevant to your puzzle. Oh... the bur...

The strong nuclear force? Red, Green and Blue describe the color charge of the quarks. Together, they have to be white(colorless) in order to be held together. I'm pretty much lost at this point and probably said it incorrectly, anyway!

If that gecko-inspired dry adhesive can stick repeatedly to human skin, I think it could be used to completely redesign headphones. Instead of having an annoying bar that goes uncomfortably over the top of your head you could reduce the weight of the entire thing by having the two ear pieces stick ...

Don't forget to bring along a limburger cheese sandwich for lunch

I recently watched a documentary titled "In the Shadow of the Moon". It chronicles the US space program and our efforts to reach the moon. Neil Armstrong took the lunar lander down to less than 30 seconds of fuel before they touched down. This video was shown. Watch it if you get a chance....

Tough one, Ann!

bystander wrote:

Boomer12k wrote:Too bad The Moon does not rotate...

The Moon does rotate. Its rotational period is equal to its orbital period, once every 27.321582 days.

I knew you were going to say that!

(Phys.org) —For many years scientists have believed that our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is set to crash into its larger neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, in about 3 billion years' time and that this will be the first time such a collision has taken place. But now a European team of astronomers led by Ho...

NGC 3603 http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7366/9135642175_f23471fd5d_c.jpg Hi Res link: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7366/9135642175_bff861caba_h.jpg NGC 3603 is an open cluster of stars situated in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way around 20,000 light-years away from the Solar System. It is sur...

WOW! That coin thingy is neat! It's better than the marble ones. Although they still depends upon "real" gravity to make them work, I do think those coin drains and dimpled rubber sheet models are much better analogies than the waterfall. They do a better job teaching the important concep...

A new study that calculates the influence of cloud behavior on climate doubles the number of potentially habitable planets orbiting red dwarfs, the most common type of stars in the universe. This finding means that in the Milky Way galaxy alone, 60 billion planets may be orbiting red dwarf stars in...

30 Doradus http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3729/9168177092_3f1a55fa23_z.jpg Hi Res link: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3729/9168177092_59021baf66_h.jpg R136 Region of the Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus, or NGC 2070), an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Compact star cluster...

Carbon dioxide and organics.

White Object, White Thingy, Reflection (not). A future geologist, walking around on Mars, finding these pieces would place them in a bag labeled "Trash from the Past". You would think NASA would try to minimize the trash and contamination it spreads around. We may live their someday. Rese...

More Government?

Pulsar? It's not even a neutron star!

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics conducted the most expensive and most elaborate computer simulations so far to study the formation of neutron stars at the center of collapsing stars with unprecedented accuracy. These worldwide first three-dimensional m...

This link has the various thingies labeled.
http://mars.nasa.gov/multimedia/interac ... 8&view=cyl