m. c. de marco

Via a mailing list: Spaceflight Now reports on a recent interplanetary collision.

“It’s as if Earth and Venus collided with each other,” said Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-author on the paper. “Astronomers have never seen anything like this before. Apparently, major catastrophic collisions can take place in a fully mature planetary system.”

Via a mailing list: BoingBoing reposts a brief excerpt from The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos, my teacher from Odyssey.

Thus it seems the lasers we have today would be capable of doing many of the things we see in Star Wars. We could injure or kill people; we could burn structures or melt holes in walls; we could destroy targeted areas of spaceships, assuming we could keep a beam on them for long enough. The main difference between Star Wars lasers and ours is the size.

Via plime, but only because I’d been ignoring several other sources of this information: the Daily Tech reports that that overdue Ice Age may finally have arrived.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.

Science Made Cool warns readers about the approaching killer cloud that could sterilize our corner of the galaxy in as little as 20 million years:

What’s likely to happen when it does arrive? A wave of new star formation — lots of new, bright, massive stars forming and then blowing themselves to smithereens in supernova explosions only a few million years later. The whole region of the Milky Way Galaxy is likely to become uninhabitable as the supernovae flood it with energetic radiation.

Via GeekPress: Nature reports that the source of the asteroid that allegedly wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago has been found.

Bottke’s team stumbled across the finding while searching through the massive Sloan Digital Sky Survey database. The team was examining a group of fragmented rocks called the Baptistina asteroid family, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, when they noticed a spot of sky that seemed to be empty.

Via del.icio.us: Reuters reports on a “gaping hole” in the universe:

A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on Thursday.

The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there.

Via SFScope: The RAND Corporation has released its legendary report, Habitable Planets for Man by Stephen H. Dole in PDF format.

An attempt to make an estimate of the probabilities of finding planets habitable to man, where they might be found, and the number there may be in our own galaxy. The characteristics of a planet that can provide an acceptable environment for man are presented in detail. The stars nearest the earth, most likely to possess habitable planets, are itemized.