Most amazing disk data recovery ever

Columbia's fragments were painstakingly and exhaustively collected. Amongst them was a 400MB Seagate hard drive which was in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.

The Johnson Space Centre workers analysing the shuttle crash sent it off the CVX-2 (Critical Viscosity of Xenon) experiment engineers, who sent it on to Kroll Ontrack in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to see if the data, any data, could be recovered. For researcher Robert Berg and his team it was the only hope, a terribly slim hope, of salvaging significant data from the experiment looking at Xenon gas flows in microgravity.

The Kroll people managed to recover 90 percent or so of the 400MB of data from the drive with its cracked and burned casing.

I didn't take too many pictures at Nerd Rave Yuri's Night, because I brought the wrong lens (I brought the 24mm because I figured the place would be full of Big Things, but, not so much). Capacitor was great, and the air show was cool. The rest was just ok.

I think the NASA-branded glowstick pretty much tells the whole story.

"Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc. Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth."

ISS Science Officer Don Pettit:

Each time, when I repressed the airlock, opened the hatch and welcomed two tired workers inside, a peculiar odor tickled my olfactory senses. At first I couldn't quite place it. It must have come from the air ducts that re-pressed the compartment. Then I noticed that this smell was on their suit, helmet, gloves, and tools. It was more pronounced on fabrics than on metal or plastic surfaces. It is hard to describe this smell; it is definitely not the olfactory equivalent to describing the palette sensations of some new food as "tastes like chicken." The best description I can come up with is metallic; a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation. It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space.

This is awesome -- I always assumed that any kind of space bombardment would be in the "nuclear holocaust" range, you know, instant flaming death from above. I didn't expect to hear about mammoths with uncomfortably-warm space acne.

Great beasts peppered from space

Eight tusks dating to some 35,000 years ago all show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments. The ancient remains come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks.

The scientists released details of the discovery at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, US. They painted a picture of a calamitous event over North America that may have severely knocked back the populations of some species.

"We think that there was probably an impact which exploded in the air that sent these particles flying into the animals," said Richard Firestone from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "In the case of the bison, we know that it survived the impact because there's new bone growth around these marks."

And geoscience consultant Allen West added: "If the particles had gone through the skin, they may not have made it through to vital organs; but this material could certainly have blinded the animals and severely injured them."

Raised, burnt surface rings trace the point of entry of high-velocity projectiles; and the punctures are on only one side, consistent with a blast coming from a single direction.

The ratios of different types of atoms in the fragments meant it was most unlikely they had originated on Earth, the team told the AGU meeting.

The researchers reported the discovery of sediment at more than 20 sites across North America that contained exotic materials: tiny spheres of glass and carbon, ultra-small specks of diamond and amounts of the rare element iridium that were too high to be terrestrial. The scientists also found a black layer which, they argued, was the charcoal deposited by wildfires that swept the continent after the space object smashed into the Earth's atmosphere.

How Super-Precise Atomic Clocks Will Change the World in a Decade

At that level, clocks will be precise enough that they'll have to correct for the relativistic effects of the shape of the earth, which changes every day in reaction to environmental factors. (Some of the research clocks already need to account for changes in the NIST building's size on a hot day.) That's where the work at the Time and Frequency Division begins to overlap with cosmology, astrophysics and space-time.

By looking at the things that upset clocks, it's possible to map factors like magnetic fields and gravity variation. "Environmental conditions can make the ticking rate vary slightly," says O'Brian.

That means passing a precise clock over different landscapes yields different gravity offsets, which could be used to map the presence of oil, liquid magma or water underground. NIST, in short, is building the first dowsing rod that works.

Previously, previously, previously.

Mystery illness strikes after meteorite hits Peruvian village

Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.

Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.

Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a "strange odor," local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.

Seven policemen who went to check on the reports also became ill and had to be given oxygen before being hospitalized, Lopez said.

Rescue teams and experts were dispatched to the scene, where the meteorite left a 100-foot-wide and 20-foot-deep crater, said local official Marco Limache.

"Boiling water started coming out of the crater and particles of rock and cinders were found nearby. Residents are very concerned," he said.

Update: Cover-up in full swing. Swamp gas. Return to your homes.

In Risks 24.80 David E. Ross wrote:

The elimination of leap-seconds is being promoted by those who are too lazy or too incompetent to code time conversions correctly. This situation arose because the long-term slowing of the earth's rotation (which creates the need for leap-seconds) failed to occur for several years, eliminating the need for leap-seconds for 7 years. Previously, a leap-second had been required every year or two.

From 1 January 1961 until 1 January 1972, UTC seconds varied in length relative to TAI seconds, leap-seconds were fractions of a second, and UTC clocks thus did not tick on the same instant as TAI clocks. I was a software test engineer on a project that handled this correctly.

UTC was redefined starting 1 January 1972 to have a second exactly the same as the TAI second, to have leap-seconds exactly whole seconds, and thus UTC clocks thereafter indeed did tick on the exact same instant as TAI clocks. The old software did not need revision; it still handled this correctly.

This was for a large software system for the command and control of military space satellites. Internal time was kept in TAI minutes from some base time because the mathematics required all minutes to be uniform in duration. External time, however, was reported in UTC (day, month, year, hour, minute, and seconds -- to the nearest millisecond). UTC was also used as an intermediate step to getting actual solar time (not mean solar time) for determining the orientation of the surface of the earth relative to a fixed coordinate system based on the stars.

When the software system was replaced in the mid-1980s, the developer (who had not worked on the previous system) did not really understand the difference between UTC and TAI. I repeatedly -- and unsuccessfully -- warned both the developer and the US Air Force (the customer) that there would be problems for not doing time conversions correctly. In the end, the Air Force was required to suspend mission operations a minute before a leap-second and resume operations a minute after. This suspension was considered to be a cost-effective response to the lack of proper design because correcting the design would impact both software and hardware with a cost of several millions of dollars (partially a consequence of poor modularization of the software). A capability that existed in 1970 no longer existed in 1992.

Rob Seaman wrote:

The first leap hour is estimated to occur in about 600 years. They accelerate quadratically after that - remember, we have leap seconds due to the tidal slowing that has already occurred. Future slowing will make leap seconds occur more frequently. There have been the equivalent of about 4 leap hours since Aristotle's time.

Previously.

Biosuit

Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon. Her spandex and nylon BioSuit is not your grandfather's spacesuit--think more Spiderman, less John Glenn.

Newman's prototype suit is a revolutionary departure from the traditional model. Instead of using gas pressurization, which exerts a force on the astronaut's body to protect it from the vacuum of space, the suit relies on mechanical counter-pressure, which involves wrapping tight layers of material around the body. The trick is to make a suit that is skintight but stretches with the body, allowing freedom of movement.

Key to their design is the pattern of lines on the suit, which correspond to lines of non-extension (lines on the skin that don't extend when you move your leg). Those lines provide a stiff "skeleton" of structural support, while providing maximal mobility.

Strange alien world made of 'hot ice'

The planet is therefore too compact to be made mostly of hydrogen gas, like Jupiter, the researchers say, but not compact enough to be a rocky 'super Earth', as some had speculated. Instead, they believe it must be made mostly of an exotic form of water.

Although the parent star is much cooler than the Sun, the planet orbits 13 times closer to the star than Mercury's orbit around the Sun. That means the surface must be a blazing hot 300° C or more, keeping water in its atmosphere in vapour form.

But the high pressures in the planet's interior would compress the water so much that it would stay solid even at hundreds of degrees Celsius -- the expected temperatures inside the planet. There are a variety of exotic 'hot ice' states possible in such conditions, with names like 'Ice VII' and 'Ice X'.

"Water has more than a dozen solid states, only one of which is our familiar ice," says team member Frederic Pont of Geneva University. "Under very high pressure, water turns into other solid states denser than both ice and liquid water, just as carbon transforms into diamond under extreme pressures."

Saturn's gravity causes ice on its moon Enceladus to grind together, generating the plumes of ice crystals and water vapour seen in recent years by the Cassini spacecraft, new calculations suggest.

The findings suggest that any liquid ocean on the moon may be buried beneath an icy shell several kilometres thick, making it difficult to ever retrieve a liquid sample that could be tested for life.

"This is a time-lapse photo showing the paths of the multiple re-entry vehicles deployed by the missle. One Peacekeeper can hold up to 10 nuclear warheads, each independently targeted. Were the warheads armed with a nuclear payload, each would carry with it the explosive power of twenty-five Hiroshima-sized weapons."

Today's vocabulary word is "fumarole".

The flanks of Erebus are spiked with ice towers, hundreds of them, called fumaroles. Gas and heat seeping through the side of the volcano melt the snowpack above, carving out a cave. Steam escaping from the cave freezes as soon as it hits the air, building chimneys as high as 60 feet.

The scientists who work on Mount Erebus say that its ice caves are every bit as much fun to explore as you might expect. But the scientists are more interested in the volcano's crater, with its great pool of lava -- one of the few of its kind. Most volcanoes have a deep central chamber of molten rock, but it's typically capped by cooled, solid rock that makes the hot magma inaccessible. On Mount Erebus, the churning magma is exposed at the top of the volcano, in a roiling 1,700-degree Fahrenheit lake perhaps miles deep.

• Meteorite's Organic Matter Older Than the Sun: It's hard to tell, but I think whoever wrote this article is unclear on the two usages of the word "organic", one meaning "contains carbon" and one meaning "life", but still, that's one old rock.

• The tiny magnetite compass in the human nose.

• QTVR of the Large Hadron Collider: 1, 2, 3.

• "[The male contraceptive pill] stops all ejaculate by blocking the pump mechanism. [...] many people love the actual physical sticky outcome -- but we understand that many don't, not least those who receive infected ejaculates."

• Democrats Reject Key 9/11 Panel Suggestion: "With control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation's intelligence agencies. [...]

  "The commission was unequivocal about the need. 'Of all our recommendations, strengthening congressional oversight may be among the most difficult and important,' the panel wrote. 'So long as oversight is governed by current congressional rules and resolutions, we believe the American people will not get the security they want and need.'"