Archive | Science

Rumours, and premature press releases!, indicate that a paper in Science by the Cassini Imaging Team suggests that there is liquid water near the surface of the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. That would be interesting in its own right but it seems that they have detected simple organic materials, and that there is more heat on average emerging from the south polar terrain, per square meter, than from the Earth. The bit in italics is a quote from the Cassini Team page. It’s a bit ambiguous. What do they mean by materials and when they talk about the heat output do they mean more heat per square meter when compared to the polar regions on Earth or other regions of the Earth?

I’m looking forward to getting the paper from Science.

Much kudos to Pro-Test. It’s about time that the case for animal testing was put in a robust manner. Ultimately some things have to be tested in an animal model before human trials are performed. I’m all in favour of minimising the use of animals to the bare minimum but, at the present time, their use is essential for progress in the biomedical area.

Update:
BBC news story on Pro-Test rally in Oxford
Observer story on Pro-Test
Observer leader
Times Online article
Telegraph article

Astronomers using The Hubble telescope have imaged two additional bodies in the Pluto/Charon system. All 4 bodies orbit a centre of gravity that lies just above the surface of Pluto. Interestingly the orbits of Charon, P1 and P2 (as the new moons are designated) have a 12:2:3 orbital resonance. For each 12 orbits Charon completes, P2 completes 2 orbits and P1 completes 3. This implies that the moons where formed from a collision event that ejected material that later coalesced into the bodies. The gravity in the system isn’t strong enough for captured P1 & P2 to have formed the resonant orbits in the time the Solar System has been in existence. There is more info in this weeks Nature. If you don’t have access there are many other sources on the Internet. It’ll be interesting when the New Horizons mission gets to the Pluto/Charon system in July 2015.

This story is covered in this weeks Nature Podcast as well.

What do you do when an octopus gets way too inquisitive about your submersible? Why turn on your thrusters of course and scare it away. Technique outlined in this video just in case you ever find yourself in this situation!