Here’s this week’s sciency links!

• STS-135 Mission Information from NASA.  A brief profile of Space Shuttle Atlantis’s last mission.
• Last Ever Shuttle to Haul Raffaello Logistics Module to the International Space Station from Space Ref.  A little more information on Atlantis’s last mission and some details about the Raffaello Module it’s carrying.
• The Risk to Waste Stored at Area G from Nuclear Watch.  Wildfires are approaching the Los Alamos Nuclear Research Center in New Mexico.  Although the main facility is not in danger (yet), the fire could reach 20,000 barrels of nuclear waste.
• Biosphere 2 Gets New Owner, Funding from Science Insider.  Biosphere 2 is an artificially enclosed ecosystem in Arizona used to study environmental and ecological issues.
•  You Can Help Bring SETI’s Ear Back Online from Bad Astronomy Blog.  Funding cuts threaten to shut down the Allen Telescope Array, a critical tool in the search for extraterrestrial life.

We all complain about the weather sometimes.  It’s too hot, too cold, too rainy, not rainy enough.  Then you read Dune.  In Dune, the weather is always hot, it never rains, and they get these ridiculous sand storms with winds over 800 kilometers per hour (500 miles per hour).  At that speed, the sand will tear apart metal and strip the skin off your bones.

On Earth, we have many different types of climate, from arid deserts to tropical rainforests.  Arrakis, the fictional planet where most of Dune takes place, has only one climate (two if you count the polar ice caps).  It is pure, uninterrupted desert.  This creates a whole lot of dangers, including those ridiculous sand storms I mentioned.

But Dune’s a science fiction novel, and the whole thing is made up.  That’s reassuring, but there’s a real planet not too far from here that at times has Arrakis-like weather.  Below are two pictures of Mars.  One is on a clear, sunny day; the other is a day back in 2001 when a sandstorm blanketed the entire planet.

Source: Hubblesite.org
Mars, like Arrakis, has only one climate (again, not counting the ice caps).  Therefore, there’s nothing to stop a sandstorm from spreading.  It can grow and grow as much as it wants, sweeping over everything, leaving no place to hide.

As much as I want to live on Mars, there are some things about it that are really scary.  This is one of them.  Let’s all be thankful Earth has the proper balance to make life not only possible but relatively comfortable.

Click here for more info on 2001’s global sand storm on Mars.

Here’s part of an interview with Frank Herbert, the author of Dune.  He has some interesting things to say about the abuse of power, a common theme in fantasy and science fiction.  It might be fun to compare Herbert to Tolkein on that subject.

This week’s sciency links.

• Understanding Science in Science Fictional Times from Biology in Science Fiction.  A good reflection on how science fiction helps the public understand science.
• Smell-o-Vision TV: Coming Soon? from The Week.  Yes, they’re still trying to invent smell-o-vision.  I can’t wait to smell the trash compactor scene in Star Wars.
• Cool News: Dinos May Have Been Warm Blooded from Live Science.  More evidence to support what Jurassic Park fans already knew.
• Citizen Science from Scientific American.  Sign up to help with a science experiment!

If you’re like me, you want to visit another planet someday.  Hopefully, someday you will.  In the meantime, there’s a video game called Mass Effect, which is probably the most scientifically accurate video game ever made.  Playing it, you almost feel like your living in an intergalactic society, landing on strange, alien planets, meeting strange, alien people.

It’s the sciency details that make this game seem so real.  You need elements like iridium and palladium to upgrade your weapons; I don’t remember anyone referencing iridium or palladium in a video game before.  And of course there’s the popular quote in reference to the laws of motion: “Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space!”

One of my favorite details is the presentation of the Doppler effect in faster than light travel.  Light waves coming from a ship will be stretched or compressed depending on whether it’s moving away from you or coming towards you, just as the sound of a train or ambulance is distorted when its moving away or towards you.  As light waves stretch, the color we see shifts towards red; compressed light shifts towards blue.

So a spaceship traveling faster than light will look blue to people ahead of it and red to people behind.  Actually, these color shifts would be much more than just red and blue; they’d go beyond infrared and ultraviolet, so a spaceship traveling faster than light is effectively invisible (a fact the game does mention at some point).

Scientists already use the red or blue shifts of other galaxies to determine their movement.  The degree of shifting even tells us how quickly those galaxies are moving relative to our own.  I don’t remember any other work of science fiction addressing the red/blue shifts of spacecraft, which is why—from a purely sciency point of view—Mass Effect is a really cool game.

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P.S.: If my little discussion on the scientific accuracy of Mass Effect doesn’t persuade you to buy it, than maybe this trailer will.  Mass Effect 3 comes out in March, 2012.

Here are this week’s sciency links.

• Some Beautiful Photos of the International Space Station from NASA.
• Voyager 1 Reaches Surprisingly Calm Boundary of Interstellar Space from Scientific American.
• A Cell Becomes a Laser from Science Now.  Organic technology like this is fairly common in science fiction.
• Quantum Entanglement from Carl Brannen’s WordPress.  A clever and entertaining look at the Pauli exclusion principle and quantum entanglement.
• Pentagon Dreams of Star Trek Interstellar Travel from the Associated Press.  My question: why does the defense department want to visit other star systems?  What do they know?

From the 1954 movie Them!

Holy f***!  That was a giant ant!  Nuclear radiation caused ants to grow into giant ants terrorizing the country!  If the special effects weren’t so cheesy, this would be a terrifying movie.

I mean, real giant insects are bad enough (click here for examples).  If I ever found a bug larger than my own hand in my apartment, I’d run screaming through the streets.  Now imagine an ant as tall as a human coming straight for you with the many parts of its mandible working hungrily.  You’d run screaming through the streets too (don’t lie; you know you would).

And if this giant ant caught you… have you ever seen an ant cut through a blade of grass?  Imagine it doing that to your arm!

Thank God this can’t actually happen.  Not because of the radiation part; radiation can cause mutations, and I suppose it could cause an animal to grow larger than normal.  But ants… in fact all insects… are limited by their passive respiratory system.  Instead of drawing air into the body, like we do with our lungs, ants depend on little holes called spiracles.  Oxygen passes through these spiracles, entering a series of hollow tubes that deliver it to the body cells.

Spiracles work fine so long as an ant is small, but giant ants like the ones in that movie wouldn’t get enough air circulating through their bodies.  They’d suffocate.  Thus, the human race is saved!

P.S.: You might be wondering what would happen if you raised the oxygen content of the air.  According to this article from Science Daily, some insect species would grow larger (no radiation required) and some would not.

On Wednesday, I wrote about how quantum mechanics, the science of incredibly small things, is now expanding into the world of things we can see and touch.  This could completely change our understanding of science, and in time lead to all kinds of new technology.  This week’s Sci Friday links focus on quantum mechanics and how the field is changing.

• Controversial Computer is at Least a Little Quantum Mechanical from Science Now.  D-Wave Systems, a company based in British Columbia, claims to have made the first commercially viable quantum computer (sometimes called a qumputer, thanks to Leonardo).
• A Press Release from D-Wave Systems.  Whether their quantum computer is quantum or not, D-Wave is making money off their invention and is now working with Lockheed Martin.
• Entanglement Goes Macroscopic from Physics World.  Magnetic particles line up faster than predicted by classical physics.  Only quantum entanglement can explain why.
• Macro Weirdness: “Quantum Microphone” Puts Naked-Eye Object in 2 Places at Once from Scientific American.  I previously referenced this article for my post on Quantum Mechanical War.
• The Spooky World of Quantum Biology from H+.  Believe it or not, the human brain may already be a quantum computer.  Quantum weirdness could also be part of other biological processes, and plants might know how to travel through time.

Science fiction is weird.  Sometimes it gets very weird, but that’s only because real science is weirder.  Here are some examples.

• Light is both a particle and a wave.  That’s pretty weird, but it gets worse.  Protons and electrons and basically everything in the universe are both particles and waves.
• These particle/waves can exist in more than one place at the same time so long as no one is observing them.  In fact, so long as no one’s observing them they can do all kinds of crazy things.  The subatomic world is throwing one wild party, but you and I aren’t invited.
• Two particle/waves can become entangled, meaning whatever one does the other does the opposite.  Albert Einstein called this “spooky action at a distance” because there is no speed of light delay, not even if the particles are light-years apart.  How can one possibly know what the other is doing?

Fortunately, quantum mechanics, the branch of science that covers this weird stuff, only applies to things that are really, really small.  You don’t have to worry about it in your everyday life… yet.

In the last decade or two, scientists have made major breakthroughs, proving that quantum weirdness can affect objects large enough to see.  Work has already begun on quantum computers, computers with parts existing in two places at once, allowing them to do more simultaneous calculations.  One company claims to have already built a quantum computer, but their claim is open to debate.

Thanks to our knowledge of atoms and molecules, we can study DNA, make plastic, and find the best materials to conduct electricity.  I should also mention nuclear power and nuclear weapons.  Imagine what our world will be like if quantum weirdness becomes just as ordinary.  It would be much stranger than science fiction.

Not convinced quantum mechanics is taking over the world?  Come back for Friday’s post.  I’ll provide links to several articles on quantum mechanics and how it applies to the world you can see and touch.