Close Shave: Asteroid To Buzz Earth Next Week. Hide captionThis computer image from a NASA video shows the small asteroid 2012 DA14 on its path as it passes by Earth on Feb. 15. An asteroid the size of an office building will zoom close by Earth next week, but it's not on a collision course, NASA says. Still, some people think this near-miss should serve as a wake-up call. "It's a warning shot across our bow that we are flying around the solar system in a shooting gallery," says Ed Lu, a former astronaut and head of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting humanity from asteroids.
The asteroid known as 2012 DA14 was first spotted last year by astronomers in Spain. It's thought to be about 150 feet across and made of rock. It will whiz past Earth on Feb. 15, going about 5 miles per second. At its closest approach, it will be only about 17,200 miles above the surface of our planet. "This asteroid seems to be passing in the sweet spot between the GPS satellites and the communications and weather satellites," Yeomans says. When Einstein Met Tagore. ‘Why Does the World Exist?’ by Jim Holt. Telescope Targets Black Holes' Binges And Burps. The NuSTAR telescope, seen in this artist's illustration, will soon be sending back data that researchers will use to study black holes.
NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption itoggle caption NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA's newest space telescope will start searching the universe for black holes on Wednesday. Scientists hope the NuSTAR X-ray telescope, which launched about six weeks ago and is now flying about 350 miles above the Earth, will help shed some light on the mysteries of these space oddities. Mission control for the telescope is a small room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, where about a dozen people with headsets rarely look up from their screens. Fiona Harrison, a professor of physics and astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, is the principal scientist for the mission. If there's one word that describes her past few weeks, it's "nail-biting," she says. The beginning of a space telescope's life is particularly stressful. Orfeo: A Dialog between Robert Hunter and Terence McKenna. This is Part OnePart TwoPart ThreePart FourPart Five (current) Terence, in reading your books I was struck with how closely your DMT experiments paralleled my own.
I wasn't surprised by the confirmation, as you might guess. I considered myself a serious DMT explorer between 1967-69. I stopped only because I was told to, in no uncertain terms, by the Boss of that place. Three times, in fact, to my dismay. Disobedience was costly. I was informed that I'd been shown all that was mine to know, to use that, and not try to extract more. Robert Hunter Greetings Bob-- I was interested in what you had to say about being an explorer of the DMT world until the management told you to stay away. I enjoy the idea of a slow moving dialog, I hope this can continue. Best, T Terence, I suppose the "facts" of DMT might as well be written in cunieform on our breastbones for all the good it does to know about it, as opposed to "dwelling in the know of it. " I don't want to sell this stuff, DMT. 23 skidoo, Bob--
Mckenna_terence_new_maps_hyperspace.pdf. The Biggest Big Question of All. Einstein & Faith. The Higgs Boson, a Blip That Speaks of Our Place in the Universe. The Non-Nerd's Guide to the God Particle, the Holy Grail of Particle Physics. It All Began in Chaos. The dust speck had been plucked from the tail of a comet more than 200 million miles away. Now, under an electron microscope in a basement lab at the University of Washington, its image grew larger, until it filled the computer screen like an alien landscape. Zooming in on a dark patch that looked like a jagged cliff, Dave Joswiak upped the magnification to 900,000. The patch resolved into tiny, jet-black grains. “Some of these guys are only a couple of nanometers in size—that’s amazingly small,” Joswiak said.
His tone was reverent. “We think this is the primordial, unaltered material that everything formed from in the solar system.” The dust speck has a name: Inti, for the Inca god of the sun. Scientists have long known that the planets, comets, and other bodies orbiting the sun were born, some 4.5 billion years ago, from a spinning disk of dust and gas called the solar nebula. “We were dumbfounded,” says Donald Brownlee, head of the Stardust team and Joswiak’s boss. What Is The Universe? Science, Religion, and the Big Bang. Do We Expand With The Universe? There is no "Fourth" dimension. The Fabric of the Cosmos: What Is Space? | Watch NOVA Online. Morgan Harris - Brian Greene: Is our universe the only universe?
Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson - We Stopped Dreaming (Episode 1) Elon Musk at SXSW: "I Would Like to Die on Mars, Just Not on Impact" AUSTIN — The most popular name on Twitter during day two of South by Southwest was Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX. During his keynote address at the conference, Musk said he would one day like to set foot on Mars, but only if he knew his company could carry on without him and the technology could get him there safely. The old joke, Musk told NowThisNews, was that he would like to die on Mars, just not on impact. Musk also said he hopes contact with life from another planet would come some day, and that it will be peaceful. "So far we haven't seen any signs of life from other worlds," he said. In 2012, SpaceX made history as the first privately held company to send a cargo payload to the International Space Station. For more of Musk's keynote address, check out the video above.
Would you spend the rest of your life on Mars if you were given the chance? Thumbnail image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Galactic Center Mosaic by Stéphane Guisard/ESO, Los Cielos de Chile.