NASA, DARPA: Colonization is a 1-Way Trip, Sign Up Now!

NASA and DARPA (it's not just a made-up shadow org from Lost!) want you to know that they're ready to colonize space. They're collaborating on a joint venture to develop a 100-year spaceship that would take humanity into the firmament and establish permanent, extra terrestrial human colonies.

From Pop Sci:

"The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden [a guy at NASA] said, according to a Singularity University blog that covered the event. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” (Worden added that he was fired by President George W. Bush.)

 Rock collecting would be a big hobby on Mars! Image: NASA.

Love that last part. So the real question here is: would the settlers ever get a chance to come home? No.
Next question. Seriously, this means they're shipping your ass off to MARS, some moon to be terraformed, or some inhabitable exoplanet, packing a lunch, and leaving you at the door of the school house. Forever.

They'll totally send you care packages of raw materials, equipment, and Soylent Green though. Hopefully, FedEx has a Red Planet

They would get periodic supply missions, but they would be expected to fend for themselves for water, shelter, nutrients and mineral/chemical processing. They would be expected to develop some kind of homegrown Martian industry, which could ultimately serve as a hub for an expanded colonization program. Plus, leaving some people on another planet would probably ensure that we’d want to go back, to visit them and see what they created.

Such a mission would save money, the authors say, because the prohibitive costs (in dollars and payload) of a manned Mars mission are mostly associated with bringing the astronauts home.

Oh, and that last point is the main reason it's a one-way gig--cost. See, coming back is expensive, and it's easier to cut costs if you just stay put. But you'll be a totally cool SPACE PIONEER. And a HERO to all humanity.

So....not you've got that going for you!

• UPDATE: I added a video of NASA's Pete Worden speaking about the project
• Full article on Pop Sci
• Tip of the hat to Boing Boing for providing some keen perspective and daring people to sign up!
• Another article at MSNBC

Video of Mysterious Undersea Creature Baffles Scientists

Pink Tentacle posits it might be a Ningen of Japanese urban legend--a blubbery, underwater humanoid! Apparently Ningen live in the icy waters of the Antarctic. This one was sighted southwest of Tokyo in the Sagami Bay.

Lots of weird sealife, but the guest of honor makes its creepy appearance begins after 1:20. Ningen on Wikipedia. 

/props to Boing Boing

Exoplanet found in habitable zone!

Artist's rendering of Gliese 581-g via Wired

Book your flights now kids, the first Earth-like exoplanet found in a "Goldilocks" or habitable zone has been discovered! Gliese 581-g is just 20 light years from us (that's right around the corner, right?) and is just the right amount of distance from it's parent star to have liquid water--a main ingredient for life here on Earth.

Click to enlarge; image: National Science Foundation

From the BBC:

"Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet," said Steven Vogt, an astronomer at UCSC.

"The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common."

Gliese 581g has a mass about three to four times that of Earth. It orbits its sun in 37 days and is thought to be a rocky world. It has enough gravity to possibly have an atmosphere.

The surface temp is estimated to be between  10F/-12C and 24F/-31C (so don't pack your speedo just yet). So think of it more like...

Don't worry, they double as sleeping bags.

Actually, that might not be the case. Seems that the planet is bigger than Earth and closer to it's star so it may not rotate--making it scorching hot on one side, colder than Hoth on the other. But a temperate equatorial zone may exist to sustain life. From Wired:

The new planet is about three times the mass of Earth, which indicates it is probably rocky and has enough surface gravity to sustain a stable atmosphere. It orbits its star once every 36.6 Earth days at a distance of just 13 million miles.

The surface of a planet that close to our sun would be scorching hot. But because the star Gliese 581 is only about 1 percent as bright as the sun, temperatures on the new planet should be much more comfortable. Taking into account the presence of an atmosphere and how much starlight the planet probably reflects, astronomers calculated the average temperature ranges from minus 24 degrees to 10 degrees above zero Fahrenheit.

But the actual temperature range is even wider, says astronomer Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who designed some of the instruments that helped find the planet. Gravity dictates that such a close-in planet would keep the same side facing the star at all times, the same way the moon always shows the same face to Earth.

That means the planet has a blazing-hot daytime side, a frigid nighttime side, and a band of eternal sunrise or sunset where water — and perhaps life — could subsist comfortably. Any life on this exotic world would be confined to this perpetual twilight zone, Vogt says, but there’s room for a lot of diversity.

Great, now let's build us a starfleet and get going!

More from BBC, Wired, Washington Post, MSNBC, NY Times, and LA Times

Triceratops no more: dinosaur actually a different species

Jimmy remembers a better time, before Kota's deceit and inevitable betrayal.

Turns out that staple of grade-school science is just a phase of growth in another dino's life cycle: the torosaurus. Or maybe it's the either way around. Whatever the case, trike and toro are the same beast at different points in their now singular life. Turns out the frill was the shill--the large frill that adorns the rear of the animals' skulls is not a sign that they were two different species, but the frill itself changed as they matured.

Image: Montana State University
via New Scientist, click to enlarge

The differences in each species (from New Scientist):

Triceratops had three facial horns and a short, thick neck-frill with a saw-toothed edge. Torosaurus also had three horns, though at different angles, and a much longer, thinner, smooth-edged frill with two large holes in it. So it's not surprising that Othniel Marsh, who discovered both in the late 1800s, considered them to be separate species.

So how did the change occur?

This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood. The only modern animal known to do anything similar is the cassowary, descended from the dinosaurs, which develops a large spongy crest when its skull is about 80 per cent fully grown.

Shape-shifting continued throughout these dinosaurs' lives, Scannella says. "Even in the most mature specimens that we've examined, there is evidence that the skull was still undergoing dramatic changes at the time of death.

First Pluto's not a planet, now triceratops isn't...a triceratops! Honestly, it's fascinating to think that we've perceived them as two different animals for decades. Sure it all sounds like a "well, duh!" moment, but think about how many animals we see every day that go through similar changes and we never think twice--a butterfly for instance.

Triceratops wasn't the only casualty, as you can tell by the image, old bone-head pachycephalosaurus is another transforming dinobot--er, saur. This new theory could extend to several other species as well.

Hopefully none of the differences in the frills or horns will effect our ability to saddle them with lasers.

Get the full story from New Scientist.
Also at Live Science.

Hat tip to Boing Boing, and the wonderful Maggie Koerth-Baker who's insight and commentary is always spot-on (and fun!).