Science

39 posts

Diamond Planet Discovered

A planet made entirely of diamond, prosaically known as PSR J1719-1438, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers led by Professor Matthew Bailes at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, and including researchers from Australia, Germany, Italy, the UK and the USA. The discovery was initially made using the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia; a radio telescope which will be well known to those who’ve seen the movie The Dish as a vital part of the network  that received signals from the Apollo 11 mission, covering most of the moonwalk. The discovery was subsequently confirmed using telescopes in Hawaii and the UK. Continue reading →

How Satellites Help us See the Un-Seeable in Deep Space


Fig 1. Hubble True-Color Image of the Cigar Galaxy (M82)

When we gaze into the night sky, we typically see only the tiny white dots of stars surrounded by the vast blackness of  an apparently-empty space, but in truth space has far more color and interest than our naked eye can reveal. One of the primary questions that students would ask me when I worked at Summers-Bausch Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, was “What is the magnification power of this telescope?” The answer was between a factor of 10 and 100, depending on which eyepiece was in use. What people need to understand is that a telescope is not a giant microscope turned upside down. The problem is not that the objects of interest in space are so small, but that they are so faint. Many of the nebulae and galaxies that we observe are nearly the same angular size as the Moon, but the telescope’s advantage is that it can gather a large quantity of light and funnel it right into your eye or onto film. Continue reading →

If the Economy Sucks, Look Between Your Legs

This is may be the greatest economic breakthrough of our time: researchers at the University of Helsinki have published a paper called “The Male Organ and Economic Growth: Does Size Matter?” Basically they successfully found a correlation between GDP and average penis size.

So you probably think the paper will find that men in wealthier countries have bigger dongs. But you’re wrong! You can have a thriving economy or large trouser snakes, but not both.

The size of male organ is found to have an inverse U-shaped relationship with the level of GDP in 1985. It can alone explain over 15% of the variation in GDP. The GDP maximizing size is around 13.5 centimetres, and a collapse in economic development is identified as the size of male organ exceeds 16 centimetres.

The absolute worst is the countries at the small penis AND weak economy end of the U-curve. Those countries get no respect in the gym locker room!

Why I’m Not Sad the Space Shuttle Program is Ending

I am a space geek.  A massive space geek.  In sixth grade, I saved up the money I got for delivering our HOA newsletter and bought a telescope, which I used to look at the moon every night, until my dad yelled at me to get off of the roof.  I talked my mom into pulling me out of class to drive 60 miles east to Mojave to watch the space shuttle land.  We were so far away that it was a white blur distorted by miles of heat coming off the desert floor, but I loved every second of it.  I ditched work to see SpaceShipOne take its two trips into space.  On Friday, weather permitting, the longest program in the short history of spaceflight is coming to a close.  Why am I not unhappy about that? Continue reading →