Rob Narrates a Hurricane Science Video

One of the fun things I get asked to do from time to time is narrate a science video for NASA. I love working with producer Ryan Fitzgibbons, he comes up with the best science videos.
   I'm helping manage the outreach and write stories about the current hurricane mission (HS3) flying unmanned (remotely piloted) aircraft out of NASA Wallops in Virginia, and I write all the updates for the NASA hurricane page (it's on facebook and Twitter, too, at NASAHurricane). So, Ryan asked if I'd narrate the video posted below. Hope you enjoy it and learn something! 
  The story that accompanies it can be found here:

NASA HS3 Instrument Views 2 Dimensions of Clouds

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-hs3-instrument-views-2-dimensions-of-clouds/

VIDEO LINK: http://youtu.be/j1RmTI68AUM

In the News: German Scientists Prove There is Life After Death

As a meteorologist, I (Rob) love it when science helps explain what we consider the "paranormal." The paranormal is only "beyond normal" until science catches up with it, and now it seems that it finally has in respect to life after death. 

 - You don't have to be of a religion to believe in life after death. You simply have to understand the science of energy. Energy cannot be destroyed only transformed and the physical energies that course through our bodies couple with our memories and personalities to become spirits that cross over, or earth-bound ghosts.  

 NOW- new research from German scientists has proven an afterlife exists. 

ere's the article:

GERMAN SCIENTISTS PROVE 

THERE IS LIFE AFTER DEATH

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SOURCE: http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/german-scientists-prove-there-is-life-after-death/

Berlin| A team of psychologists and medical doctors associated with the Technische Universität of Berlin, have announced this morning that they had proven by clinical experimentation, the existence of some form of life after death. This astonishing announcement is based on the conclusions of a study using a new type of medically supervised near-death experiences, that allow patients to be clinically dead for almost 20 minutes before being brought back to life.

This controversial process that was repeated on 944 volunteers over that last four years, necessitates a complex mixture of drugs including epinephrine and dimethyltryptamine, destined to allow the body to survive the state of clinical death and the reanimation process without damage. The body of the subject was then put into a temporary comatic state induced by a mixture of other drugs which had to be filtered by ozone from his blood during the reanimation process 18 minutes later.

The extremely long duration of the experience was only recently made possible by the development of a new cardiopulmonary recitation (CPR) machine called the AutoPulse. This type of equipment has already been used over the last few years, to reanimate people who had been dead for somewhere between 40 minutes to an hour.

Near-death experiences have been hypothesized in various medical journals in the past, as having the characteristics of hallucinations, but Dr Ackermann and his team, on the contrary, consider them as evidence for the existence of the afterlife and of a form of dualism between mind and body.

The team of scientists led by Dr Berthold Ackermann, has monitored the operations and have compiled the testimonies of the subjects. Although there are some slight variations from one individual to another, all of the subjects have some memories of their period of clinical death. and a vast majority of them described some very similar sensations.

Most common memories include a feeling of detachment from the body, feelings of levitation, total serenity, security, warmth, the experience of absolute dissolution, and the presence of an overwhelming light.

The scientists say that they are well aware the many of their conclusions could shock a lot of people, like the fact that the religious beliefs of the various subjects seems to have held no incidence at all, on the sensations and experiences that they described at the end of the experiment. Indeed, the volunteers counted in their ranks some members are a variety of Christian churches, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and atheists.

“I know our results could disturb the beliefs of many people” says Mr Ackermann. “But in a way, we have just answered one of the greatest questions in the history of mankind, so I hope these people will be able to forgive us. Yes, there is life after death and it looks like this applies to everyone.”

- See more at: http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/german-scientists-prove-there-is-life-after-death/#sthash.Dni7U5Cy.dpuf

Science Blog: How do astronomers know the mass of Jupiter?

I (Rob) love science and I don't know that much about planetary sciences, and this is one question and answer that I've wondered about. EarthSky.org put together this great, easy-to-understand explanation.
I think you'll find the answer interesting:
How do astronomers know the mass of Jupiter?


Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system and boasts of more than twice the mass (heaviness) of all the other solar system planets, dwarf planets, moons and asteroids combined. But how do astronomers even begin to know Jupiter’s mass? If a planet has an observable moon (or moons), astronomers can figure out that planet’s mass. Jupiter has four major moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – that’ve been watched and studied with great intensity, ever since Galileo first discovered them through an early telescope in the year 1610. Follow the links below to learn more about finding the mass of Jupiter, using its moons.

How can an orbiting moon reveal its planet’s mass? The more massive the planet, the more swiftly its moons revolve around it. Because Jupiter’s moons move in orbit around Jupiter so very swiftly, astronomers know right off the bat that Jupiter is an exceedingly massive world. Jupiter’s moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto – lie more distant from Jupiter than our moon does from Earth. Yet these moons orbit Jupiter in far less time than our moon orbits Earth.  If Earth were as massive as Jupiter, our moon’s orbital period would be some 1.5 days, instead of its present 27.322 days!
     By orbital period, we mean the period of time that it takes the moon to go full circle in front of the constellations of the Zodiac. This time period is known as the sidereal month.



TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS:
Computing Jupiter’s mass with Jupiter’s moon Callisto. Yes, we can compute Jupiter’s mass, relative to the mass of Earth, with Jupiter’s moon Callisto. All we need to know is Callisto’s mean distance from Jupiter, or semi-major axis, in Lunar Distances (LD), and Callisto’s orbital period relative to the moon’s orbital period (sidereal month).

 Left to right: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto

One Lunar Distance (LD) = 384,400 kilometers (238,855 miles)
Moon’s orbital period = 27.322 days.
Callisto’s mean distance from Jupiter is 1,882,700 kilometers (1,169,856 miles) and its orbital period is 16.689 days. Converting Callisto’s mean distance and orbital period into lunar figures:
a = Callisto’s mean distance = 4.898 lunar
p = Callisto’s orbital period = 0.611 lunar
We plug these numbers into the equation below. Voila! We have Jupiter’s mass in Earth masses.
Mass of Jupiter = a³/p²
Mass of Jupiter = a x a x a/p x p
Mass of Jupiter = 4.898 x 4.898 x 4.898/0.611 x 0.611
Mass of Jupiter = 314.756 Earth-masses

SOURCE: http://earthsky.org/space/how-do-astronomers-know-the-mass-of-jupiter?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=36901a1e0d-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-36901a1e0d-307928925#how

MUST WATCH! Cosmos w/ Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Space Time Odyssey Episode 1

Wow. We just watched the National Geographic/Fox Program Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson - American astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science.
EVERYONE who wants to be educated about the cosmos, the universe, solar system, history and science should watch this 45 minute presentation. FINALLY, a science show that will educate as it should. 
  - Neil does an outstanding job narrating, and it's done in an easy-to-understand way. The visuals are stunning and the look back into history and how painfully science evolved was refreshing. 
  Every child, teen, and adult needs to know the basics of science and this is a great introduction. 
  For those who refuse to watch and learn and choose to believe stupidly that the Earth is 6,000 years old, you are as foolish as those in the 1500s who put people to death who had the vision to look beyond ancient beliefs and traditions. We can only grow if we open ourselves up to discovery - otherwise we remain ignorant. Science is a growing, ever-changing, dynamic field of new discoveries every day. BE A PART OF THAT.  (Yes, as a meteorologist, I'm very passionate about science). - Rob
 *UPDATE: Sadly the video has been pulled off of You Tube... but keep looking. I'm sure that National Geographic and Fox will re-run it.**

Fascinating Interview w/Cosmologist Lawrence M. Krauss about his findings and recent book "Everything and Nothing."

   As a scientist (meteorologist) and someone who has been following the latest research into the cosmos, including Stephen Hawking's research, I found this interview fascinating. It's an interview conducted by author and philosopher Sam Harris (a famous author in his own right) with Lawrence M. Krauss about his findings and recent book "Everything and Nothing."

   I urge everyone to read at least this first question and answer (and the others can be found at the following link). FULL INTERVIEW: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/everything-and-nothing/

   I plan on reading this book and learning from it... Krauss' findings parallel those of Stephen Hawking. 

- Rob

Lawrence M. Krauss is a renowned cosmologist, popularizer of science, and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University.  He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and 8 books, including the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek. His interests include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics. He is also a friend and an advisor to my nonprofit foundation, Project Reason. Lawrence generously took time to answer a few questions about his new book, A Universe from Nothing.

***

One of the most common justifications for religious faith is the idea that the universe must have had a creator. You’ve just written a book alleging that a universe can arise from “nothing.” What do you mean by “nothing” and how fully does your thesis contradict a belief in a Creator God?
Indeed, the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” which forms the subtitle of the book, is often used by the faithful as an unassailable argument that requires the existence of God, because of the famous claim, “out of nothing, nothing comes.”  While the chief point of my book is to describe for the interested layperson the remarkable revolutions that have taken place in our understanding of the universe over the past 50 years—revolutions that should be celebrated as pinnacles of our intellectual experience—the second goal is to point out that this long-held theological claim is spurious. Modern science has made the something-from-nothing debate irrelevant.  It has changed completely our conception of the very words “something” and “nothing”.  Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the Universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not, and ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy. (Indeed, religion and philosophy have added nothing to our understanding of these ideas in millennia.) I spend a great deal of time in the book detailing precisely how physics has changed our notions of “nothing,” for example.  The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly.  I then go on to explain how other versions of “nothing”—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into “something.”  Indeed, in modern parlance, “nothing” is most often unstable.  Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur. 
Now, having said this, my point in the book is not to suggest that modern science is incompatible with at least the Deistic notion that perhaps there is some purpose to the Universe (even though no such purpose is manifest on the basis of any of our current knowledge, and moreover there is no logical connection between any possible “creator” and the personal God of the world’s major religions, who cares about humanity’s destiny).  Rather, what I find remarkable is the fact that the discoveries of modern particle physics and cosmology over the past half century allow not only a possibility that the Universe arose from nothing, but in fact make this possibility increasingly plausible.  Everything we have measured about the universe is not only consistent with a universe that came from nothing (and didn’t have to turn out this way!), but in fact, all the new evidence makes this possibility ever more likely.  Darwin demonstrated how the remarkable diversity of life on Earth, and the apparent design of life, which had been claimed as evidence for a caring God, could in fact instead be arrived at by natural causes involving purely physical processes of mutation and natural selection.  I want to show something similar about the Universe.  We may never prove by science that a Creator is impossible, but, as Steven Weinberg has emphasized, science admits (and for many of us, suggests) a universe in which one is not necessary. 
I cannot hide my own intellectual bias here.  As I state in the first sentence of the book, I have never been sympathetic to the notion that creation requires a creator.  And like our late friend, Christopher Hitchens, I find the possibility of living in a universe that was not created for my existence, in which my actions and thoughts need not bend to the whims of a creator, far more enriching and meaningful than the other alternative.  In that sense, I view myself as an anti-theist rather than an atheist.
 FULL INTERVIEW: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/everything-and-nothing/

BOOK: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/145162445X?ie=UTF8&tag=wwwsamharri02-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=145162445X

NOAA Animation of Tsunami Wave Throughout the Pacific-post Quake

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration created this animation to show how the tsunami waves (generated by Japan's 8.9 Richter Scale earthquake last week) propagated throughout the Pacific Ocean. It's a fascinating look at how the quake affected the Pacific Ocean (North and South Pacific).

For more information about it, check out the NY Times DOT Blog: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/ocean-spanning-power-of-japans-great-quake-on-display/

Science Has Finally Caught Up with Spiderman

It looks like scientists have finally caught up with Spiderman, and have learned how to create a tough spiderweb, stronger and lighter than steel. Really! In the comics, Peter Parker developed his spiderweb formula and shooters in the 1960s. Who would have thought that almost 40 years later it becomes a reality. The Reuters news story about the new science is below:

(REUTERS) LONDON - Spider silk is already tougher and lighter than steel, and now scientists have made it three times stronger by adding small amounts of metal.
The technique may be useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, including artificial bones and tendons. "It could make very strong thread for surgical operations," researcher Seung-Mo Lee of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany, said in a telephone interview.
Lee and colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Science, found that adding zinc, titanium or aluminum to a length of spider silk made it more resistant to breaking or deforming. They used a process called atomic layer deposition, which not only coated spider dragline silks with metal but also caused some metal ions to penetrate the fibers and react with their protein structure.
Spider silk has long fascinated scientists but producing it in commercial quantities is difficult because spiders kept in captivity tend to eat each other.