RoboBee, First Flying Robotic Insect (Video of the Day: 5/3/13)

It is finally upon us, the dawn of the Age of the Robotic Insects! Robert J. Wood, principal investigator for the RoboBee project, and a graduate student of his have finally developed a tiny, flying robot that has been 12 years in the making. The problems here are how to get tiny wings to both give enough lift to raise the tiny machine off the ground, and how to control its flight. This tiny robot weighs a mere 80 milligrams and has two separately controlled wings to provide it with lift. The next step for the RoboBee is to develop a light enough battery so that it no longer has to be tethered to power, but the rig will still offer researchers insights into wing design even before that battery is developed.
For more information, check out this article.

World's Smallest Movie (Video of the Day: 5/2/13)

IBM has gone above and beyond with their marketing. They have actually figured out how to use a scanning tunneling electron microscope to move and view thousands of carbon atoms to make a movie. The technology to do this has existed in the past, but no one has ever used it to this extent before now. This is an astounding achievement by the company, considering that this movie is literally made on an atomic level. I, personally, am impressed.
For more, check out this article.

Star Birth at the Edge of the Universe (Picture of the Day: 4/30/13)

HFLS3, a galaxy churning out 3000 solar masses worth of stars every year. Source

It seems like astronomy these days is rife with new and fantastic discoveries. This new discovery, made by the Herschel observatory, gives us a look back into the beginning of the universe.

Light does not travel instantaneously, so it is possible for us to "look back in time" by observing objects that are extremely far away. With this principle in mind, looking at a galaxy that is 13 billion light years away is like looking 13 billion years into the past. The Herschel observatory has done this itself. It has peered through the inky emptiness of space and viewed a galaxy, HFLS3, that lies 13 billion light years from our own solar system, meaning that we are seeing this object when it was only 800-900 million years old (that's really young). The surprising thing about this, however, is that HFLS3 shows an incredible amount of stellar genesis. This galaxy "is" producing stars at a rate of 3000 solar masses per year. That's an incredibly high rate of formation, higher than any of our models predicted. These new deep-field telescopes are allowing us to peer farther and farther into history, and we are coming up with some pretty impressive things. I predict that our entire way of thinking about astronomy will change soon.

For more information, check out this article or this article.

The dots in red are galaxies that have extreme rates of stellar formation.

Bug Spacesuit (Picture of the Day: 4/24/13)

Insect larva. Source

In an astounding display of "I wonder what happens when I do this..." scientists have created a nano-spacesuit for insects. These scientists weren't trying to send bugs into space or anything, they were actually trying to find a way to make insect larvae survive long enough to examine them using an electron microscope, a device that requires a vacuum to function. They started by taking Drosophila larvae (fruit fly larvae) and bombarding the sheath of extracellular substances that they create with a stream of electrons. When they did this, that sheath fused together to form an incredibly thin layer of polymers that kept gases and liquids in, even against the harsh environment of a vacuum. These scientists went farther and created a similar nano-suit around other larvae that don't excrete the same extracellular substances using Tween 20, a fairly common substance. Insects that have one of these nano-suits can survive for upwards of an hour in vacuum with no ill effects. I think this is pretty amazing.

For more information, check out this article.

Wringing out Water in Space (Video of the Day: 4/23/13)

I just thought that this was a cool demonstration of a principle that most people don't think about. When people think of something as "sticky", they usually imagine a gluey substance that gets everywhere and is inherently "wet", but that's not the case. "Stickiness" is really just electrostatic force between two objects, meaning that the balloon that you rub against your hair and then stick to a wall is also "sticky", just as is plastic wrap. Water is one of the more "sticky" substances because it is attracted to itself. When this astronaut wrings out the washcloth, the water is sticking to itself and making a tube of water as well as gloves of water. It's hard to see this on Earth because gravity often overcomes this electric-stickiness, but this demonstration was perfect.
For more, check out this article.

Orbital Sciences Antares (Picture of the Day: 4/22/13)

Orbital Sciences Corp's Antares rocket lifts off. Source

Yesterday (Sunday, April 21), at 2 p.m., Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket lifted off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. This launch was merely a test of the company's new rocket designed to resupply the International Space Station, but it went off without a flaw. Due to technical problems and launchpad delays, this mission was delayed for over a year, but it was worth it. Orbital Sciences is one of several companies competing to take NASA's place as the rocket designers and builders. One of the current companies that has made two successful flights to the ISS is SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corp.), one of the most well-known companies involved in the "space race".

It may be a while before we really become a space-faring people, but with successful tests like this, it may one day happen.

For more information, check out this article.

3 Possibly Habitable Planets (Picture of the Day: 4/18/13)

Artist's conception of Kepler-62e and -f. Source

Just today, NASA announced that their Kepler mission has discovered three new Earth-like exoplanets that are in the right spot to support life. The first two planets both orbit the star Kepler-62, about 1,200 light years away. The first planet, Kepler-62e has an orbit, or "year", of 122 days, and the second, Kepler-62f, has an orbit of 267 days. Both of these planets are about the size of Earth and orbit in the "Goldilocks zone", the distance from a star where the temperatures are "just right". The third planet orbits Kepler-69 and is about 70% larger than Earth. This planet has an orbit of 242 days.

In coming years, missions like TESS will allow us to know more about the composition of these planets, but for now it's exciting to see that these planets exist and to know that there is a very good chance that life exists elsewhere in the universe.

For more information, check out this article.