This is the Spacefreaks Weblog after all so today's leading article is about the Venus probe, which is set for launch.
The Soyuz space rocket vehicle carrying the European Space Agency's (ESA) Venus Express will launch from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 0333GMT on Wednesday.
The prove will take a 162 day journey, which will orbit the planet for 16 months studying its dense atmosphere, which is thought to be the result of an extreme greenhouse effect.
ESA scientists hope the mission will study the Venus clouds in unprecedented detail and give them valuable data about the mechanisms of climate change here on Earth.
Nothing special there, just letting you all know we expect to get some more data from Venus soon.
Space-Walking
Here's a quick article about the recent spacewalks.
Expedition 12 Flight Engineer Valery Tokarev and Commander Bill McArthur spent over 5 hours outside the International Space Station, performing their first spacewalk. During their time in space, the two men installed a new video camera on the P1 truss structure and jettisoned a probe attached to the exterior of the station. The mission started an hour later than planned because of a misaligned valve in the Quest airlock that needed troubleshooting.
It's hard to figure out just how much NASA is invested in the ISS.
Nanobomb
In Delaware, they're tesing nanotubes to blast cancer cells.
At the heart of Panchapakesan's nanobombs are single-walled carbon nanotubes. While these tiny structures have been heralded as the material of the future for their astounding strength, Panchapakesan is focused on one of their other strange features: When heated by a laser at an 800-nanometer wavelength, they explode.
The exact physics of the combustion aren't well understood, but it probably works because water molecules stuck inside spaghetti-like globs of the nanotubes overheat and force the explosion to occur. Since the explosive nature of nanotubes was first discovered in 2002, some scientists have theorized that they could form a new kind of military explosive or even a rocket propellant.
Panchapakesan saw another possibility. Why not sprinkle them next to cancer cells and then blow them up like tiny improvised explosive devices? He did just that, and the method showed enormous selectivity when he focused the laser on the cells he wanted to excise.
"In other words, we can reduce the collateral damage so that we're killing only the cells we want to kill without harming healthy cells," he says.
While the explosive aspect of his research is novel, Panchapakesan isn't the first to use nanodevices to fight cancer. Naomi Halas, a Rice University engineering and chemistry professor, showed in 2003 that she could kill cancer cells by inserting nanoshells made of gold and heating them with near infrared light to the point where they die. Stanford's Hongjie Dai (.pdf) performed a similar feat with carbon nanotubes this year.
Very American thinking... "Blow it up with minimal collateraal damage!"
IDiots
Kansas state Board of Education is reinstating Evolution into its science curriculum.
TOPEKA, Kan. Nov 8, 2005 — Revisiting a topic that exposed Kansas to nationwide ridicule six years ago, the state Board of Education approved science standards for public schools Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.
The board's 6-4 vote, expected for months, was a victory for intelligent design advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.
Critics of the proposed language charged that it was an attempt to inject creationism into public schools in violation of the separation between church and state.
About bloody time.
Meanwhile, I found this at David Brin's Weblog:
What is fascinating about ID is the way the ID-nostalgists have been forced to adopt the memes of the enlightenment in order to push their case. They strive relentlessly to portray THEIR position as the openminded and fair one, while stodgy-elitist scientists are suppressing competition and fair debate. By trying to give themselves a patina as "science" and calling evolution "another religion" they aim to portray ID as a bold underdog. When, of course, science is still the rebel world view, even after 200 years.
Now that's insightful and funny.
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