Colorado Café Scientifique

News 18 May 2007: Dark matter visualized. The Hubble Space Telescope was used to study a pair of galaxy clusters that are colliding 5 billion light years from Earth. (To be accurate, they collided 5 billion years ago!) From the visible mass of stars and gas, the clusters should be flying apart, but they aren't. Why not--is there some mass there that can't be seen? The images of even more distant galaxies, seen through the colliding clusters, are distorted; the light from them is bent by mass it passes as it heads towards us. So the scientists mapped the degree of distortion, plotted it as a color gradient over the Hubble image of the galactic clusters, and saw a dark ring of otherwise invisible mass. This ring is almost surely dark matter, and it's an incredible 2.5 million light years across. Excellent images are available here.
News 11 February 2008: The CDC missed in its guess about 2 of the 3 flu strains in this year's vaccine (see below, 13 July news item.) But it's not too bad. From the CDC: "As of February 2, 2008, nearly all H1N1 viruses tested to date at CDC were well-matched to the H1N1 vaccine strain. However, most of the H3N2 and B virus strains were different from those contained in the vaccine, suggesting that protection against circulating H3N2 and B virus strains may not be optimal. However, it’s important to remember that even when the viruses are not closely matched, the vaccine can still protect many people and prevent flu-related complications. Such protection is possible because antibodies made in response to the vaccine can provide some protection (called cross-protection) against different, but related strains of influenza viruses."
News 16 November 2007: For those of us who can never keep geochronology straight (was the Phanerozoic before the Epicene? was Jurassic before Thoracic, or after Plasticine?) the USGS has published the 2-page .pdf update Divisions of Geologic Time-Major Chronostratigraphic and Geochronologic Units with a table of the latest names and dates. Very handy! Get it here.
News 18 October 2007: Denver Café Sci Wins Award. Your Café Sci just got the 2008 10BEST Award as "one of the best bets for Slices of Life." Read about it, and "rate" us (though why you'd want to is not clear) if you are so inclined, by clicking here.
News 13 July 2007: Influenza vaccines prepared for the 2007–08 season will include A/Solomon Islands/3/2006 (H1N1)-like, A/Wisconsin/ 67/2005 (H3N2)-like, and B/Malaysia/2506/2004-like antigens. These viruses will be used because they are representative of influenza viruses that are anticipated to circulate in the United States during the 2007–08 influenza season. We’ll see if the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices gets it right once again; they have a pretty good track record.
News 14 June 2007: The Fourth Report from IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), as mentioned in the Café by Mark Serreze, is available now on-line, as are the previous three in full detail as well as "Summaries for Policymakers" and many other interesting and important links which you can skim for things to ponder.
News 19 May 2007: If you remember Marc Sher's amazing Café about the Higgs boson, you may be wondering how the construction of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is coming along. The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert has written well about the machine and its science in the 14 May issue; you can access the article here. Hardware problems have delayed the LHC coming on line until April 2008.
News 1 May 2007: A camel skeleton was found in the site of a future Wal-Mart in Mesa, Arizona. Big news for our southern neighbors but ho-hum for Coloradoans, as we heard recently from Kirk Johnson. Camels are thick on the ground here, especially in Denver (where they are catalogued “by street address rather than GPS coordinates.”) They originated in North America and fossils are found throughout North and South America, even in the Yukon and Alaska. This is one of the few Wal-Mart items not made in China.
News 31 October 2006: It's a go for a September 2008 mission to Hubble, to replace batteries,add some cool new instruments (including the Widefield Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, designed at CU Boulder and built by Ball Aerospace), change the oil, and inflate the tires. Good news! This will keep Hubble operating until 2013, when the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to be launched. Full information from NASA here.
News 26 September 2006: Xena the dwarf planet has been renamed Eris (Ee'-riss, after the Greek goddess of discord and strife), and her moon Gabrielle is now Dysnomia (Eris' daughter, another baddie). Whether this is an improvement is hard to say.
News 26 September 2006: David Grinspoon, who spoke at the Café Sci in March 2005, has been awarded the American Astronomical Society’s prestigious Carl Sagan Medal for 2006. David is curator of astrobiology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. He was honored for his skill in communicating science to the public. Click here for more information.
News 28 August 2006: Pluto is no longer a planet, according to the International Astronomical Union. Within femtoseconds of the announcement, according to astronomers at the Mount Palomar observatory, Pluto disappeared from view. "We knew the IAU is all-powerful," said the Director, "but did not expect this." On the brighter side, he pointed out that Pluto has always been a baleful influence for Scorpios like him, and was hopeful that after all these years he could finally get a date.
But what you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts. In the 10 August Nature a group of observers from Taiwan report that radiation from the X-ray source Scorpius X-1 is repeatedly occulted at millisecond intervals. They conclude that the only explanation is that there are numerous trans-neptunian objects, too small to see with telescopes but whizzing in front of the star, out there where Pluto and its friends reside. How many? Maybe 4 quadrillion. That's a lot of planetary schmutz. Maybe New Horizons (all of whose instruments are working well) can get a look at some of it.
News 11 February 2006: Steve Fossett has broken the record for the longest flight in history, traveling 26,389.3 miles in 76 hours 45 minutes. He was forced to land GlobalFlyer at Bournemouth Airport in the UK, just short of his target at Kent International, when his generator failed. He was minutes from being forced to ditch the aircraft when his Mayday call raised ATC at Bournemouth. It was a rough landing: two tires blew and without electricity his windscreen was so heavily iced that he had little visibility. He is apparently in good shape, though pretty tired. The flight began in Florida, crossed the Atlantic, Africa, Saudi Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, the North Pacific, Mexico, USA, the Atlantic again, and into the southern UK. Steve Fossett is one helluva pilot, besides having done just about everything else. He lives in Beaver Creek. The whole effort was sponsored by Virgin Atlantic; it goes without saying that the plane was designed by Bert Ruttan.
News 15 January 2006: Stardust, the mission that left earth in 1999 to capture samples of a comet, has landed its cargo in the Utah desert this morning, apparently intact. Stardust came within 236 km of comet Wild II, whereupon it extended its detector, about 0.1 cubic meters of Aerogel, an almost weightless silica foam. It may have captured about many minute particles of matter that predate the solar system. Now they have to find them in all that empty gel, and they are asking for interested volunteers. Robots will cut the gel and make the photomicrographs, and send you images to scan. There will be about 2 million pictures so they need volunteers. The project is coordinated at Berkeley, contact them here.
News 25 Dec. 2005: The highest prime so far discovered is 2^30402457-1. This number has 9.1 milllion digits, so it doesn't win the $100,000 prize for the first prime with 10 million digits. Get out your calculators!
News 20 Dec. 2005: Judge Jones rules for science. You can read his entire opinion in Kitzmiller et al v. Dover Area School District, a 139 page, 310 KB pdf document, here. It is superbly intelligent and you can learn a lot about the scientific method from it. An instant classic, this should be in every classroom.