GriffinScience

You’ll be 23 (and I’ll be a chipper 45) in 2023 when we could launch the first boat in space. Head over to NewScientist to read this great post on a possible future probe that will also be the first “space-boat”… NASA floats Titan boat concept – space – 09 May 2011 – New Scientist: [...]

Fascinating and a must read… Stephen Hawking Speaks – NYTimes.com: “On a screen attached to his wheelchair, commonly used words flash past him. With a cheek muscle, he signals an electronic sensor in his eyeglasses to transmit instructions to the computer. In this way he slowly builds sentences; the computer transforms them into the metallic, [...]

Perhaps! Going to read the quoted paper tonight and I’ll let you know how it goes. The universe’s very first black holes might be even older than the Big Bang itself: “But that hasn’t stopped physicists Bernard Carr and Alan Coley from taking these two ideas and knitting them together into one spectacular proposal: that [...]

Should be a fun transition year ahead of us… Spartanburg Day School moves to SCISA Region II-2A | GoUpstate.com: “Spartanburg Day School is making a move from the Carolinas Athletic Conference to SCISA Region II-2A, Griffins athletic director Dan Gilmartin said on Friday.” As always, Go Griffins!

Beautiful… These Little Lights of Mine: “Scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) have created the largest ever three-dimensional map of the distant universe by using the light of the brightest objects in the cosmos to illuminate ghostly clouds of intergalactic hydrogen. The map provides an unprecedented view of what the universe looked like [...]

From the Herald Journal… Carver, Day School students helping preserve Old City Cemetery | GoUpstate.com: “‘It’s a wonderful feeling,’ said Lee Vasbinder, an Australian transplant to Spartanburg, who teaches math at the Day School. ‘I hope that it will eventually be restored to the beauty, importance and reverence that it deserves.’” Thank you for your [...]

Fascinating… Heaviest Particle of Antimatter Found | Big Bang & Antihelium | LiveScience: “At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) – a particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory — the nuclei of gold atoms collide, head-on, at near the speed of light. This simulates the conditions just after the Big [...]

We’ll be covering the various parts of the Electromagnetic Spectrum in class this week, including radio waves… New radio wave technique could detect alien planets, receive interstellar tunes — Engadget: “So scientists at the University of Leicester in England developed a new approach: looking for radio waves emitted when ultraviolet flares light up the atmospheres [...]

Here’s to the incredible Hubble Space Telescope turning 21 today… Happy birthday Hubble (for real this time) | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine: “Today is the 21st anniversary of Hubble’s launch into space — I wrote about this the other day, when a pretty picture of colliding galaxies was released, but got the date wrong. [...]

Head over to read the whole article… CERN marks advance in universe mysteries search | Reuters: “Scientists at the CERN physics research center reported on Friday that they had smashed particles together at a record intensity in a key advance in their program to unveil mysteries of the universe.” Fantastic time to be studying particles [...]