Entered Apprentice
Saturday’s photoguess: what does this monkey symbolize?
There are two questions for this week’s photoguess:
1) What exactly does poor monkey symbolize?
2) Where is this strange artefact located? (Answering this question will also help you to find answer for the question 1).
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Dynamics of space storm
A team from the U. of Alberta was able to observe a space storm in its full dynamics – at least during first minutes from its birth. For that, they used a network of cameras located in multiple places within Canada – you can see exact location of vertices of the grid on the video below. Phase front propagation velocity of the storm in the atmosphere was about 100000 km/h, so it took a couple of minutes for the storm to cover the whole Earth (well, half of it) from the moment first electrons hit the atmosphere.
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One step for a Man
Nature News has decided to start running a Twitter microblog devoted to the history of Apollo 11 mission – the first manned mission to the Moon. They will basically twit all the steps of the mission, to the Moon and back, day after day, event after event as if it was happening today, in 2009. They also promise that the feed will include various contextual information – politics, related events, etc. Following this Twitter feed you will open yourself to a quite unique experience: learn exactly what your father felt back in 1969. Thanks so much for this precious gift, Nature. Such feeds as yours make Twitter a really great service, worth to have a Twitter account.
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LISA technology and instrumentation
Oliver Jennrich (European Space Agency) has prepared a large review on technical aspects of LISA (space laser interferometer) mission – the project is extremely complicated for realization, many technologies are not even yet fully developed, and various prototypes will have to be launched. Yet, possible payout is so huge – even including possible detection of gravitational waves from the very early Universe – from inflationary and reheating stages (just think about it – detecting EM radiation did not really allow us to go beyond redshift 
so far, not including here CMB of course). Who is a sucker for space research as I am – please check out the paper. It does not discuss science related to the mission but contains tons of technical information about LISA you won’t find anywhere else.
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Test beam for LHCb
Video about LHCb experiment and the recent test of their detector using Super Proton Synchrotron. LHCb experiment is one of six particle detector experiments aimed to measure CP violation in the interaction of b-hadrons (hadron containing b quarks).
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A bit about climate change
Recently, an idea that sharp terrestrial climate change might be directly correlated to spiral arm passages of the Solar system became very popular. Namely, certain correlations of times of spiral arm passage with timing of ice ages and abundance of 
in fossils were claimed to be found (in the latter case, effective abundance of grows if gets locked up in ice). The basic idea is that if Solar system goes through spiral arms of the Milky Way, the event rate of cosmic rays in the Earth’s atmosphere greatly increases (since the number of supernovae in spiral arms is clearly much larger than in between the arms) and this presumably affects formation of clouds and therefore strength of greenhouse effect. However, in reality we don’t know very well when Solar system passed between the Galactic arms to make sufficiently strong statements about presence of such correlation.
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How to use technology to teach undegraduate biology
Explanations by Stony Brook U. professor William Collins: it was fun to watch for me.
The very meaning of socialism
Hehe, Lubos Motl will go crazy… 
I received a rather strange email message yesterday; since it was from unspecified person (spam in other words), I decided to share it with you – see below.
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Rocky Kolb’s lecture on Dark Universe
… namely, about dark matter and dark energy as you may imagine. The lecture itself (2009 Buhl lecture at Carnegie Mellon U) is actually very clear and suitable for newcomers/non-scientists. So, if you want to know in some details (more or less technical) what the modern cosmology is all about, please check out this lecture.
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Carnegie Mellon’s contribution to Star Trek universe
… apart from training Spock, I mean – the head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon U. discusses several interesting projects being developed at the University which are worth putting into the universe of Star Trek.
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Tour of Ares IX
Jim Halsell (former astronaut) takes Miles O’Brien on a tour through the various components of the new NASA Ares IX rocket.
Into dark ages or again about GRB090423
Back in April, I already wrote about GRB090423 – currently the most distant detected object in the Universe. Yesterday, two papers with details of mesurement have appeared in astro-ph (unfortunately, Icannot give you the links – see my comment below).
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How to spot a black hole on the Sky
Here is a video from NewScientist featuring simulations by Loeb and his collaborators (we have discussed Loeb’s results several times on NEQNET). The idea is that BH acts as a strong gravitational lense, so if we have a close system “star-BH”, we will see a very specific pattern of light when the companion star crosses the “disk” of BH. Of course, in order for us to spot this pattern, it is better if the line of our sight lights in the orbit plane of the star.
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This and that in ArXiv on Monday
Due to unbelievable overload of the last days let me simply list the recent papers in ArXiv that I found the most interesting:
1. Quantum information
T. Tilma el al., “Is entanglement a critical resource for quantum metrology?”
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Three last Susskind’s lectures on general relativity
… that is, lectures 10, 11 and 12: gravity in 4+1 dimensions, dynamics of scalars in curved spacetimes (and behavior of gravitational potential – which is scalar), a bit of topology (Euler characteristics), Lagrangian of a relativistic massive point particle, geodesics in curved spacetime and, finally, Schwarzschild solution.
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