Joe Stanley

Politico. Geek. Ginger. Now working at Tumblr.
thenewenlightenmentage: 50 Years Ago, an Astronomer Discovered the First Unambiguous Exoplanet (or So He Thought) In April 1963, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Tucson, Ariz., Peter van de Kamp made what should have been a landmark announcement. By tracking the motion of a dim, nearby star across the night sky, he had uncovered an unseen object tugging ever so slightly on the star and perturbing its motion—an exoplanet, well before that became a household word. The gravitational perturbation was so subtle that van de Kamp, a Dutch-born astronomer at Swarthmore College, had relied on almost 50 years of telescope observations to build his case for the planet orbiting what is known as Barnard’s Star. Continue Reading What you re-discover when doing research.

thenewenlightenmentage:

50 Years Ago, an Astronomer Discovered the First Unambiguous Exoplanet (or So He Thought)

In April 1963, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Tucson, Ariz., Peter van de Kamp made what should have been a landmark announcement. By tracking the motion of a dim, nearby star across the night sky, he had uncovered an unseen object tugging ever so slightly on the star and perturbing its motion—an exoplanet, well before that became a household word. The gravitational perturbation was so subtle that van de Kamp, a Dutch-born astronomer at Swarthmore College, had relied on almost 50 years of telescope observations to build his case for the planet orbiting what is known as Barnard’s Star.

Continue Reading

What you re-discover when doing research.

distant-traveller: First X-ray view of Martian soil This graphic shows results of the first analysis of Martian soil by the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) experiment on NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image reveals the presence of crystalline feldspar, pyroxenes and olivine mixed with some amorphous (non-crystalline) material. The soil sample, taken from a wind-blown deposit within Gale Crater, where the rover landed, is similar to volcanic soils in Hawaii. Curiosity scooped the soil on Oct. 15, 2012, the 69th sol, or Martian day, of operations. It was delivered to CheMin for X-ray diffraction analysis on October 17, 2012, the 71st sol. By directing an X-ray beam at a sample and recording how X-rays are scattered by the sample at an atomic level, the instrument can definitively identify and quantify minerals on Mars for the first time. Each mineral has a unique pattern of rings, or “fingerprint,” revealing its presence. The colors in the graphic represent the intensity of the X-rays, with red being the most intense. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ames

distant-traveller:

First X-ray view of Martian soil

This graphic shows results of the first analysis of Martian soil by the Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) experiment on NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image reveals the presence of crystalline feldspar, pyroxenes and olivine mixed with some amorphous (non-crystalline) material. The soil sample, taken from a wind-blown deposit within Gale Crater, where the rover landed, is similar to volcanic soils in Hawaii.

Curiosity scooped the soil on Oct. 15, 2012, the 69th sol, or Martian day, of operations. It was delivered to CheMin for X-ray diffraction analysis on October 17, 2012, the 71st sol. By directing an X-ray beam at a sample and recording how X-rays are scattered by the sample at an atomic level, the instrument can definitively identify and quantify minerals on Mars for the first time. Each mineral has a unique pattern of rings, or “fingerprint,” revealing its presence. The colors in the graphic represent the intensity of the X-rays, with red being the most intense.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ames

Our Commitment to Our Users’ Privacy

yahoo:

By Marissa Mayer, CEO and Ron Bell, General Counsel

We’ve worked hard over the years to earn our users’ trust and we fight hard to preserve it.

To that end, we are disclosing the total number of requests for user data that law enforcement agencies in the U.S. made to us between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013.  During that time period, we received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests, inclusive of criminal, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other requests.  The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations.

Like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out FISA request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue.

Democracy demands accountability.  Recognizing the important role that Yahoo! can play in ensuring accountability, we will issue later this summer our first global law enforcement transparency report, which will cover the first half of the year.  We will refresh this report with current statistics twice a year.

As always, we will continually evaluate whether further actions can be taken to protect the privacy of our users and our ability to defend it.  We appreciate—and do not take for granted—the trust you place in us.

I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care about your economic background. I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.

And so then so what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t….” Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

So you get out of their way. And you know what you do? You put things in their midst that help them explore. Help ‘em explore. Why don’t you get a pair of binoculars, just leave it there one day? Watch ‘em pick it up. And watch ‘em look around. They’ll do all kinds of things with it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (via senoranelson)