Occasionally I read stories of people and companies afraid to donate food to shelters, food banks and other non-profits because of liability – fear not potential food donors! The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act (passed in 1996) is a federal law guaranteeing a donor cannot be subject to civil or criminal liability when giving food to a non-profit for distribution to needy individuals unless the donor voluntarily and consciously gives food they know is bad.

So, you know, don’t do that.

The (very short) text of the law and other info on the law at the U.S. Government Printing office.

Nasa’s LCROSS lunar mission uses Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Nasa’s LCROSS lunar mission last week gave Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the extra-planetary exposure it has always deserved. A Twitter feed from the satellite sent crashing onto the moon’s surface on Friday channelled the voice of an improbably created sperm whale that discovers itself hurtling towards a different outer-space collision in Adams’s much-loved story.

Here’s the LCROSS twitter feed and the following are the status updates for impact:

• Centaur Impact into Cabeus! #lcross Now it’s my turn!
• I’m 300km from the moon! #lcross
• Wow, 150km from the moon! #lcross
• “And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round,
• it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’!”
• “That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me?”

Initial analysis of the plume from the lunar impact seems to indicate iron and mercury, not water.

…and by some lazy folk, too.

Parizek had noticed that some tombs in the Valley of Kings, in Luxor, Egypt, were aligned with surface fractures that can be between 5 and 40 feet wide and up to a mile long. The fractured rock would have made for easier tomb digging, she figures. Of the 63 tombs in the area, 30 have so far been found to lie on fractures, while two lie diagonal to a trace and one is not on a fracture.

“From my observations, it seems that tomb builders may have intentionally exploited these avenues of less resistant limestone when creating tombs,” Parizek said.

And it seems that even in Ancient Egypt, you got what you paid for…

When tombs are created under the cracks, water can flow in and destroy paintings on the walls and ceilings and cause the interior surfaces to flake off. But if scientists divert water away from entrances to known tombs, they might send it to another tomb that has yet to be discovered.

The Homeless World Cup (of soccer) took place last month in Milan, Italy.

The Homeless World Cup is an annual, international football tournament, uniting teams of people who are homeless and excluded to take a once in a lifetime opportunity to represent their country and change their lives forever. It has triggered and supports grass roots football projects in over 60 nations working with over 25,000 homeless and excluded people throughout the year.

To qualify:

(1) Players
Are male or female and at least 16 years old (must have turned 16 before 01.09.2009) and
Have been homeless at some point after 01.09.2008, in accordance with the national definition of homelessness or
Make their main living income as street paper vendor or
Are asylum seekers currently without positive asylum status or who were previously asylum seekers but obtained residency status after 01.09.2008 or
Are currently in drug or alcohol rehabilitation and have been homeless at some point in the past two years (post 01.09.2007)
Have not taken part in previous Homeless World Cup tournaments.

But will anyone hear a red clown nose honk? How well will seltzer spray? Will a clown suit double as a space suit if needed?

The founder of the phenomenally successful Cirque de Soleil took part in a live international news conference from the space station back to Earth, broadcast over NASA TV.

He wasn’t wearing the red nose he sported on his journey to space on Sept. 30, but Laliberté’s humour has clearly infected the rest of the crew of professional astronauts, including Canadian Bob Thirsk.

A western kingbird riding, and harassing, a red-tailed hawk. Photo by Pat Gaines.

In hopes of making it cry.

NASA will send a used-up spacecraft slamming into the moon’s south pole to kick up a massive plume of lunar dirt and then scour it to see if there’s any water or ice spraying up. The idea is to confirm the theory that water – a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon – is hidden below the barren moonscape.

These are not crashes for the faint of heart. The two ships will smash into the moon at 5,600 mph, more than seven times the speed of sound. The explosion will have the force of 1.5 tons of TNT and throw 772,000 pounds of lunar dirt out of the crater. It will create a new crater – inside an old one – about half the size of an Olympic swimming pool, Andrews said.

Watch it here. This’ll be happening around 4:30 a.m. PDT, Friday, 09 October.

Because nothing says college hockey like a hockey stick wielding polar bear strapped to a rocket destroying our solar system to Kenny Loggins’ “Highway to the Danger Zone.” The 12-year-old in me salutes you, sir.

Thanks Pat, now update your site once in a while.

Being a mad scientist has never been so cheap!

In their study, the researchers used a commercial-grade Epson R280 inkjet printer to print patterns of lactose and glucose onto an agar gel culture of E. coli…

Although it doesn’t sound like they can use the less expansive black cartridges, though. Those printer companies always find a way to make you pay for it:

…the researchers used a syringe pump to manually inject the lactose and glucose “inks” into the printer’s color reservoirs. The printer functions completely normally, but prints the injected solutions rather than ink. The Epson R280 also has the ability to print on rigid substrates, enabling the researchers to use normal compact discs (CDs) as substrates.

So what was all this inkjet creativity for?

“On a scientific level, we demonstrated that, by controlling the position and timing of chemical dosing in a biological system, we can manipulate arbitrary genetic circuits into behaving like more complex morphogenetic circuits, which are the genetic circuits that regulate pattern formation, such as where our head is relative to our feet and why we have five fingers.”

But does it come with an mp3 player and telecommunication capabilities? Can you tweet with it? In a year or two paparazzi are going to be able to use this technology to take pictures of starlets exiting cars while wearing skimpy dresses.

The upshot is that their camera can time the arrival of a photon to within 100 picoseconds, and they can do it up to 1 million times a second. “And every microsecond we can count up to 64 photons,” declares Charbon.

So the camera could work so quickly and accurately, they had to build “1024 miniaturised watches, working with the same power supply and the same precision, on a space about the size of the head of a pin.”

And then there’s data transfer and storage:

Of course, all these electronics in 32 by 32 array produce a staggering amount of data, so the partners needed to develop new and improved ways of moving the data from the pixels into storage. In the end, they developed a high-speed, highly parallel readout capable of achieving 10Gb/s.

< Older Posts :::   

===== == ========================================== == =====

Home :: About :: Archives :: Contact

This blog powered by a splitting headache caused by too many hours staring at a computer screen pushing pixels about instead of doing something productive, or, failing that, just going outside and getting some fresh air.

.