Hasta La Gadget!

Following the news that scientists have developed a black hole simulator video comes word that astronomers now suspect hundreds of of these things are roaming loose in our very own Milky Way, according to Science.

That doesn’t mean we have to hide under our desks or anything. But the report said that these black holes are likely orphaned from smaller galaxies that
the Milky Way has swallowed over its billions of years of existence, adding that the discovery of one could tell us things about the evolution of our galaxy.

The science behind it is a bit much for my layman’s eyes, but computer simulations have revealed that in a collision between a large galaxy and a smaller one, the gravitational interaction could sometimes “kick the smaller black hole out of the smaller galaxy’s center,” but still remain within the confines of the larger galaxy. All of these gulping black holes and huge explosions in space are fun to read about as long as they stay far, far away, as far as I am concerned.

NASA’s Swift Observatory detected a gamma-ray burst from a supernova last Thursday, one that astronomers have now confirmed is more than 13 billion years old, according to Scientific American.

Scientists first knew that the burst, called GRB 090423 (the date it was first detected), was unusual when it wasn’t being picked up by any optical telescopes. Like many gamma-ray bursts, this one was short lived, lasting just seconds, according to the report. The burst’s age puts it just 600 million years after the birth of the universe.

“Swift was designed to catch these very distant bursts,” NASA’s Swift lead
scientist Neil Gehrels, of the Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement. “The incredible distance to this
burst exceeded our greatest expectations–it was a true blast from the
past.”

For the
first time since the Apollo era of the 1960s, NASA is testing a new moonship “in the
turbulent waves of the open ocean,” according to Space.com. The agency is testing a life-sized mock-up of its Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle in the Atlantic Ocean off the eastern coast of
central Florida, in an attempt to see how it does with a water-landing.

“During the
tests, teams of divers and engineers are practicing recovery
techniques to retrieve an Orion capsule after splashdown, as well as
testing how the spacecraft performs in open water,” the report said. “The sea trials are the first
in which recovery teams attempted to attach a flotation collar around the Orion
craft while it bobbed up in down with the ocean waves.”

The Orion
crew capsule is NASA’s
planned replacement for its three aging space shuttles, which are due to
retire at the end of next year, according to the report. The capsules can carry six astronauts to the ISS, or four astronauts to the moon and back. Each capsule is about 15 feet wide and weighs 18,000 pounds–about six Honda Accords, essentially.

Star Trek will disappoint no one.

As the lights dimmed and the familiar Star Trek Federation logo slid on screen, the emotion of all those hours of watching Next Generation reruns as a kid came sloshing back into my brain, dripping out of my eyes as tears of pure happiness. I expect that it was essentially the same emotion Star Wars fans felt during the opening credits of Episode 1, but without the massive letdown afterwards. (Ha ha, suckers.)

But yes, to answer your question, there’s Kirk, there’s Spock, and there’s everyone you expect (even Pike!). Not all of the same mannerisms are there, but if you wanted to see the old actors you’d go watch the first six movies again. This implies that Kirk doesn’t do a two-hour Shatner impression, which is, of course, good news. Instead, he plays Kirk as a intelligent, brash, but friendly youngster that has confidence oozing out of every torpedo tube. And the new Spock is more Sylar than Spock, to be honest; though the rest of the casting is essentially spot on.

So long as you go into the movie expecting a “Star Trek” movie, in that there’s space and aliens and action and shooting and torpedoes and pew pew pew, you’ll come out happy. The movie is targeted enough toward the mainstream in that someone with zero Trek experience would enjoy it. Director J.J. Abrams also gives enough shout outs to old time staples that trekkers will be giddy at the slight nods and fanservice that say, in essence, “thank you for supporting us all these years, now here’s something you asked for.”

Think of it like Casino Royale was to the James Bond franchise: fewer gadgets, more action and an incredibly pugilistic lead. And lens flares. Lots, and lots, and lots of lens flares.

Kirk’s Enterprise has never looked better. These guys took the original ship, combined it with some designs of the Enterprise-B, then mashed it up with Picard’s Enterprise-E and then added a dash of ’60s non-Trek Sci Fi. The set design, however, is almost all touchscreen (like TNG), but with a tremendously updated UI. I’d hate to call it Apple-y, but there’s lots of glass and slick white finishes. Retro this is not—you’ll barely be able to equate the bridge to the original’s, other than the fact that the players are all sitting in the right places. Why Bones canoodles in the bridge so much instead of where he’s supposed to be is still beyond me.

And the plot? The plot makes as much sense as any other Star Trek movie. There’s even a very good explanation of why this movie is the way it is, which is the most I can say about that.

This is what Star Trek needs right now. After writing on Next Generation, Ron Moore went on (about a decade later) to reimagine Battlestar Galactica, a relatively realistic show (topic-wise) that just happened to be set in space. Sci Fi fans have moved on from the utopian, and what many accused as sterile, confines of TNG to a grittier, less kempt future.

That’s not to say Star Trek is now gritty—it’s just more…modern. And more sexy. Like when you upgrade from a six piece KFC meal to a 12 piece bucket: you’re going to get more breast and thigh.

It also doesn’t have any crap about the Prime Directive or any undertones about race that TOS and TNG dealt with, but it is a very good “restart” of the franchise. With this film as the base, I cannot wait to see where the franchise goes from here.

Bonus: there’s a four-issue Star Trek: Countdown comic series that prequels the movie. Though, you might want to wait until after you watch to read, since it gives away a few plot points. To tell you more would be to spoil too much. It’s too much even to tell you what KIND of fans would like the comic. You can download the first one here for your iPhone.

Static cling makes lunar dust stick to the instruments astronauts use to conduct experiments on the moon, according to a new survey of 40-year-old Apollo mission data. Brian O’Brien, a now-independent researcher in Floreat, Western Australia, and a former professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, determined that the angle of the sun in the lunar sky modulates the “clinginess” of lunar dust, Scientific American reports.

Since the moon has little atmosphere, solar radiation hits the lunar surface and gives it a clingy electrostatic charge, the report said. If O’Brien’s theory proves correct, this will be a larger problem for future manned missions than it was back in the Apollo days, when astronauts undertook them in the “morning” (roughly equivalent to a month here on earth, according to the article). The solution? You guessed it: a shed. “A sun-proof shed may provide dust-free working environments on the moon,” O’Brien said.