(Photo by Lomonosov Moscow State University)
Asteroid 2014 UR116, A 400-meter Sized Near-Earth Asteroid, Represents No Threat to the Earth
(NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office / December 8, 2014 / http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news187.html)
Some recent press reports have suggested that an asteroid designated 2014 UR116, found on October 27, 2014, at the MASTER-II observatory in Kislovodsk, Russia, represents an impact threat to the Earth. While this approximately 400-meter sized asteroid has a three year orbital period around the sun and returns to the Earth's neighborhood periodically, it does not represent a threat because its orbital path does not pass sufficiently close to the Earth's orbit.
Furthermore, Tim Spahr, Director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge Massachusetts, has also re-computed this object's orbit after noticing that it was the same as an object observed six years ago. Using both sets of observations, the future motion of this asteroid was carried further forward in time using the automatic computations made by the Sentry system at NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These computations rule out this object as an impact threat to Earth (or any other planet) for at least the next 150 years. Read More »
Signs of Life on Mars?
(The New York Times, Dec 8, 2014) NASA has scheduled a news conference Dec. 14 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union with “new information” about the search for organics.
Starting on Friday Dec 5, 2014, when Digital Einstein is introduced, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to share in the letters, papers, postcards, notebooks and diaries that Einstein left scattered in Princeton and in other archives, attics and shoeboxes around the world when he died in 1955.
Visitors to the new Digital Einstein website will be able to toggle between the English and German versions of the texts. They can dance among Einstein’s love letters, his divorce file, his high school transcript, the notebook in which he worked out his general theory of relativity and letters to his lifelong best friend, Michele Besso, among many other possibilities. Einstein, who like many other 20-year-old college students did not lack for a sense of self-dramatization, once wrote to his sister, Maja, “If everybody lived a life like mine, there would be no need for novels.” As it would turn out, he did not know the half of it. Read More »
European probe shoots down dark-matter claims
Planck's four-year study of relic radiation also resolves other cosmological riddles.
by Ron Cowen & Davide Castelvecchi
Nature, doi:10.1038/nature.2014.16462, 02 December 2014.
http://www.nature.com/news/european-probe-shoots-down-dark-matter-claims-1.16462
Adam Voorhes & Alex Hannaford: Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital, powerHouse Books, New York December 2014, 176 pages, ISBN 978-1576877081.
