Skyehaven’s Cool Thing of the Day

While you’re waiting for the space shuttle to launch, be sure to check out NASA’s new streaming video from the ISS. When they don’t actually have video streaming, it shows the flyover path so you can get an idea if you’ll be able to see it pass overhead. If you can’t watch the video, for whatever reason, you can still listen to the mission audio.

Enjoy!

…the ISS is about to take your place.

Venus is about to be ousted as the brightest star-like object in the night sky. The next space shuttle mission, STS-119 is slated to launch on Wednesday night, March 11 at 9:20 p.m. EDT (1:20 a.m. Thursday March 12 GMT), and astronauts will deliver and install the fourth and final set of solar array wings to the International Space Station. Once the array is deployed, the station will surpass Venus as the brightest object in the night sky, second only to the Moon. The new array will increase the amount of electricity available for science experiments by 50%, providing the power needed for the ISS to house a crew of 6 astronauts instead of the current 3.

I’ve seen an ISS pass, though not for a few years. The coolest one was shortly after I moved to FL in ’97 when the husband and I went down to the beach near dawn to watch a shuttle launch and the ISS passed over shortly after. You can see if the ISS is scheduled to fly over your location within the next 10 days at Heavens Above or just track it at NASA’s shuttle tracking page.

Happy star/object gazing!

Baseball cards just got a whole lot cooler.

Just hold the special 3D Live card in front of a webcam and watch a three-dimensional avatar spring to life — rotate the card and the figure rotates in full perspective. The technology provided by Total Immersion also allows collectors to drop the player into simple pitching, batting and catching games using the computer keyboard. Series 1 cards will cost $2 for a 12-pack while a buck snags a fistful of five.

Be sure you click through to the website for video of this marvel. File this one in “how do they DO that?”

I’ve decided to start a new weekly tradition. With an entire weekend staring me in the face, let me introduce you to the Friday Time Waster. This week’s installment looks promising to waste not only my time, but my son’s too.

We all know approximately what happened when USAirways flight # 1549 had to make an emergency landing on the Hudson on January 16, 2009. Intellectually I knew what a hero that pilot was; flying above New York City with both engines out, he not only managed to avoid crash landing into one of the most densely populated areas of the United States, but he did it without causing any serious injuries among his passengers.

It’s one thing to know this intellectually; it’s quite another to see it. This is a very well-done simulation in a third party view of exactly what happened and how amazingly the pilot did his job.

Created by Train Horns

The website claims that a significant number of people over 25 can’t hear this tone. Well, I now have the headache to prove that I can. But it got me to wondering. I haven’t had a hearing test in … well … Let’s just say since I left public school and leave it at that, shall we?

Anyway, since I was wondering and I have a ‘satiable curiosity, I went looking for a website that talks more about this teenage mosquito tone thing. The one I found was interesting, but really didn’t go into the depth I was looking for. A bit more poking around and I found a site where you can download your very own mosquito ringtones, which has a pretty substantial list of tones in various formats that you can try out. Their recommendation is that you go down the list for the last tone you can hear, as that will make it less likely that the adults around you who don’t want you getting cell phone calls will be able to hear it. I can hear them all, so I guess I still have the ears of a teenager.

Not content there, I wondered if there are full-blown hearing tests online. Glory be, there are. There’s too much background noise at work for me to try it, but I’ll give it a whirl when I get home!

What about you? What’s the last mosquito ringtone YOU can hear?

Yes, apparently there is. The slime mold’s intelligence has been proven.

In their experiment, biophysicist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University and colleagues manipulated the environment of Physarum slime-mold amoebas (near right). As the cells crawled across an agar plate, the researchers subjected them to cold, dry conditions for the first 10 minutes of every hour. During these cool spells, the cells slowed down their motion. After three cold snaps the scientists stopped changing the temperature and humidity and watched to see whether the amoebas had learned the pattern. Sure enough, many of the cells throttled back right on the hour in anticipation of another bout of cold weather. When conditions stayed stable for a while, the slime-mold amoebas gave up on their hourly braking, but when another single jolt of cold was applied, they resumed the behavior and correctly recalled the 60-minute interval. The amoebas were also able to respond to other intervals, ranging from 30 to 90 minutes.

The jury’s still out on the rest of us, though.

And now, for something quite different.