Science

Folks at JPL are not taking the holiday weekend off.   Last night, the Phoenix landed on Mars, near the north pole.

There’s reportedly been no sign of the Martian Santa Claus yet, but I am wondering: if Mars is populated with little green men, wouldn’t that make Martian Santa’s elves more like gnomes?

Seriously, the mission plan as I understand it is:

1.  Find subsurface ice.
2. …
3. Profit!

It’s that time of the year again, in which what is surely the top science news story of the year makes the rounds in the media and the blogosphere:  this year’s IgNobel Award winners have been announced.

From the BBC (since the IgNobel website appears to be Slashdotted as I write this): 

2007 Ig Nobel Winners

Medicine - Brain Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK, and Dan Meyer for their probing work on the health consequences of swallowing a sword.

Physics - A US-Chile team who ironed out the problem of how sheets become wrinkled.

Biology - Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands for carrying out a creepy crawly census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and fungi that share our beds.

Chemistry - Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for developing a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.

Linguistics - A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.

Literature - Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the”, and how it can flummox those trying to put things into alphabetical order.

Peace - The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops.

Nutrition - Brian Wansink of Cornell University for investigating the limits of human appetite by feeding volunteers a self-refilling, “bottomless” bowl of soup.

Economics - Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Aviation - A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.

Congratulations to the, um, winners. 

The Amazon is the worlds longest river, not the Nile, according to a recent expedition. From National Geographic:

The scientists claim to have traced the river’s source to a snow-capped mountain in southern Peru, adding a new twist in the swirling debate over the longest river label.[...]

The Brazilian scientists’ 14-day expedition extended the Amazon’s length by about 176 miles (284 kilometers), making it 65 miles (105 kilometers) longer than the Nile.

According to the team’s results, which have not been published, the Amazon is 4,225 miles (6,800 kilometers) long. The Nile stretches 4,160 miles (6,695 kilometers)/

Personally, I’m just amazed that in this day and age, there’s still apparently an open question about where exactly a major river begins and ends.

Seen at New Scientist:

A new analysis of pictures taken by the exploration rover Opportunity reveals what appear to be small ponds of liquid water on the surface of Mars.[...]

If confirmed, the existence of such ponds would significantly boost the odds that living organisms could survive on or near the surface of Mars, says physicist Ron Levin, the report’s lead author, who works in advanced image processing at the aerospace company Lockheed Martin in Arizona.[...]

The imaging shows that the areas occupy the lowest parts of the terrain. They also appear transparent: some features, which Levin says may be submerged rocks or pebbles, can be seen below the plane of the smooth surface.