NASA’s Humanoid Space Robot Butler Ready to Launch.

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Humanoid! Robots! In space! It’s been 15 years in the making, and now mankind is finally ready to launch Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot, into space. The “robot butler” is designed to help human space travelers, and perhaps, at some point, even replace them during particularly risky missions.

Robonaut 2 will be part of the November 1st shuttle launch, taking off packed in a box full of foam on the space shuttle Discover.

“The challenge we accepted when we started the Robonaut project was to build something capable of doing dexterous, human-like work,” NASA’s Rob Ambrose told MSNBC. “From the very beginning, the idea was the robot had to be capable enough to do the work but at the same time be safe and trusted to do that work right next to humans.”

In the meantime, he’s been embarking on an equally arduous mission: Twitter. The space ‘bot has been tweeting since July under the handle @AstroRobonaut. He’s accrued some 16,000-odd followers in that time, helping engage space fans with tweets such as, “I have exactly one week left on Earth — Discovery (and I!) launches at 4:40 p.m. Eastern on Nov. 1!!”

Godspeed, robot space butler.

Scientists Attempt to Prove Universe is Actually a Cartoon

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3-D is the hottest new trend in movies. But it’s all just filmmakers punking the human brain into perceiving depth in a two-dimensional image. And, according to some theoretical physicists, this may be how the Universe works. Depth is all an illusion of time. The Big Bang never occurred. And you, your family, your pets, every monkey that ever existed, the entire cast of The Jersey Shore, and the starting line-up of the 2010 All-Star game are all two-dimensional holograms. The Universe is a big flat cartoon.

So goes one theory.

The theory of a Holographic Universe has floated around for sometime. But it’s never had any hard data to back it up–it was just an explanation that nicely tied up mathematical loose-ends about black holes and gravity on a chalk board.

However some evidence for the unreality of reality may have showed up last year. The GEO600 is an internationally-collaborative experiment based in Germany that is attempting to detect and measure theoretical gravitational waves–or minute ripples in the fabric space-time. However, the experiment just keeps running into low levels of “noise.” The GEO600 team still plans to continue searching through the noise to detect these theoretical gravitational waves.

But Craig Hogan, a particle astrophysicist with the US Government-sponsored high-energy physics research lab Fermilab thinks the GEO600 team found exactly what they were looking for. Hogan sees this barrier of noise as a blurring or pixelating effect from zooming in too far. He theorizes that this is exactly what one would expect to happen if the Universe were a two-dimensional hologram. And now he and his team want to prove it.

Hogan is overseeing a super-sensitive holometer being developed at Fermilab. The holomter is almost like a super precise clock that will be able to measure the inherent fuzziness of space-time, and may give a clue to it’s true form. Hogan and his team are building two devices to confirm each other’s work. They hope to start collecting data next year.

via Symmetry Magazine

Moon Crash Landing Reveals Silver, Water, More

This time last year, NASA’s LCROSS mission sent a probe crashing into a lunar crater, in hopes of kicking up evidence of water on the moon. According to some new data, the scientists got a lot more than they bargained for–the crash kicked up high concentrations of silver and mercury, as well.

Scientists have found trace amounts of those elements on lunar rocks sent back to earth in the past, but nothing so far has suggested that they are so prevalent on the lunar surface. Scientists believe that the existence of the elements offers a clue as to how water first arrived on the moon.

“The silver is like a tracer,” Peter Schultz, the leader of the study told National Geographic. “It tells us where [moon water] probably came from, and I think it’s telling us that it came from comets and asteroids colliding with the moon.”

Galaxy is Most Distant Object ever Discovered

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According to an article in the latest issue of the weekly science journal Nature, a newly discovered galaxy has “smashed the record for the most distant object ever observed. The galaxy is more than 4 billion parsecs away. A parsec, for those keeping track, is roughly 19 trillion miles.

The galaxy was discovered using spectroscopic observations in a patch of sky that scientists have deemed the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The sheer distance of the thing offers scientists some insight into the early days of our universe.

Says Nature,

The object sheds light on the nature of the sources that stripped electrons from hydrogen atoms during the reionization epoch.

NASA’s Plans for One-Way Ticket Space Colonization

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Everybody knows space is awesome. That’s why aliens and the sun live there. The one draw back is that space is huge. Annoyingly, impractically huge. The nearest planet is 24 million miles away. It even takes eight minutes to reach the earth from the sun. The sun could have just blown up, and you wouldn’t know it until you’ve finished reading this post and three others. And the rest of space is just… space. It takes a long time to get to the good stuff.

Almost too long.

That’s why NASA (along with the pocket-protector warriors of DARPA) is spending some real time and money designing plans for space colonists to take one-way trip to spread the human species to far-flung space locales. The so-called “Hundred-Year Starship” program is building the foundation for an interplanetary version of the Mayflower. Space colonists would head off into the cosmos, with no real anticipation of returning to the Earth.

The program isn’t some theoretical message board either. NASA is kicking in $100,000 for the project, while DARPA is contributing an additional million. And that’s recession money.

There are no real details of what the project specifically hopes to accomplish. But the fact of the matter is our government is putting some real capital behind the idea of space colonization.

I’m just going to hope they don’t know something that we don’t about the future habitability of this planet.

via PopScience

Father, Son Send iPhone Into Space on Balloon

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I remember going to the batting cages with my dad. We went to our fair share of A’s games, too. He also helped me make a Pinewood Derby car a few years in a row. To the best of my knowledge, however, we never sent anything into space. Man, what a lousy childhood. Back in August, however, the father and son team of Luke and Max Geissbuhler (age 7) did just that.

The duo attached an HD camera (in the form of an Apple iPhone) to a weather balloon and launched the thing up into the atomosphere. “It would have to survive 100 mph winds, temperatures of 60 degrees below zero, speeds of over 150 mph, and the high risk of water landing,” Geissbuhler wrote in the introduction of a video documenting the event.

And people say the iPhone isn’t rugged?

The craft all came equipped with a self-deploying parachute and a GPS device to help the Geissbuhlers retrieve it once it came crashing back to earth.

The whole thing is the product of eight months of research. Check out the results after the jump.

Admiral Akbar Loses Ole Miss Mascot Fight

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[Above, Ackbar, disappointed, we think].

He warned you that it was a trap. But did you listen? Nope. As per usual, Admiral Akbar fought valiantly, but even the Supreme Commander of the Rebel Alliance Fleet has to lose some.

The University of Mississippi today chose a replacement for its outdated Colonel Reb Conderate-style mascot. In spite of a huge grassroots push on behalf of Star Wars fans to get Ole Miss to adopt the Mon Calamari general as its figurehead, the school went with a bear in a sweatband.

“After reviewing more than 1,000 mascot suggestions, the selection committee submitted 11 concepts for public input at the end of June,” the school wrote in a press release. “Based upon the results of the first poll and work with design professionals, those 11 choices were narrowed down to the three final selections, and artist’s renderings of the concepts were unveiled Oct. 6.”

LucasArts, for its part, hadn’t done much to support the push. The Star Wars company flatly refused to give the school the rights to bug-eyed fish-looking thing.

New York UFOs Identified (It’s Balloons)

Earlier today we told you about the UFO that caused quite a stir amongst New Yorkers after being spotted floating above the Chelsea neighborhood yesterday afternoon. My favorite quote from the whole thing was from a witness who goes by the name Rico, “t’s a little crazy. I guess that’s why they call it an unidentified flying object because they don’t know what it is.”

Turns out we do know what it is, however. The silvery object (or object was) was, as we suspected, just a bunch of balloons. Now someone has taken responsibility for the origin of the UFO.

A parent was bringing a bunch of 40 iridescent pearl balloons up to Westchester County to celebrate a teacher’s engagement party. It got windy and a few of the balloons go away–the next thing they knew, the balloons were all over YouTube.

“UFO? They’re crazy – those are our balloons!” Angela Freeman, the head of the school told The Daily News. “To me it was the most automatic thing. But it’s all over YouTube.”

A combination of high wind, a clear sky, and a change in the balloons’ shape due to the high altitude are being blamed for the mistaken identity.

Asteroid Collision Causes Atomic Bomb-Like Explosion

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It’s shaping up to be a big week for asteroids–at least so far as we earthlings are concerned. Days after a flying space rock came within 28,000 miles of our little planet, scientists are sharing images from the Hubble Telescope detailing what happens when two “modest-sized” asteroids collide at a speed of 11,000 miles an hour.

The resulting explosion, according to the scientists, is “as powerful as the detonation of a small atomic bomb.” The result from that explosion is the above image that scientists are calling “peculiar,” given that “X” shape you can see in the left side of the shot, at the beginning of the trail of debris.

The collision that created the object knows as P/2010 A2 (catchy, no?) actually occurred back at the beginning of last year. The object, meanwhile, was discovered earlier this year. The findings were published in a recent issue of Nature Magazine.

According to scientists, “modest-sized asteroids smash into each other about once a year.” Actually being able to find them via telescope is pretty difficult, however.

Asteroid Whizzes By Earth

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Mankind is safe. For now. Earlier this week, an asteroid whizzed by our little blue planet–dangerously close, at least in astronomical terms. The rock flew above a section of Southeast Asia by Singapore. At around 6:51 AM ET, it was at its closest to the planet–around 28,000 miles away.

The asteroid, 2010 TD54 was first discovered on October 9th, by scientists in Arizona at a NASA-sponsored lab.

The rock was pretty small–33 feet across at most, according to the MIT scientists who were monitoring it. Even if it was headed toward Earth, we likely would have been okay. The asteroid would have almost certainly burned up when it entered the atmosphere.