You wouldn’t think the genome sequencing for an ear of corn would turn out to be one of the most complex sequencing that scientists have concluded.  The reason for such complexity is that about 85 percent of its DNA is composed of transposable elements — segments of DNA that can move between locations.

Water droplets interacting with water at 2,000 frames per second.  They can bounce!  Incredible. [via]

The Big Picture is featuring beautiful photos of Martian Landscapes shot from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It never ceases to shatter my mind’s comprehension and ability to process things when I read that astronomers have found galaxies 800 million-years-old and that “pinpoints when an era called the reionization epoch likely began.”  I don’t even know what reionization means but it sure as hell sounds important.

My life has been a constant struggle against the futility of existence, that when you think about things like the universe being 800 million-years-old you begin to question your own insignificance.  Still, despite that, the odds of humans even existing in the first place is miraculous.  Let’s not even begin to talk about evolution how we went from single cell organism to complex animals to sentient beings.  That’s impressive.

“So here’s the upshot: of the 4.6 Gy [gigayears] of Earth’s known history, there’s only been enough oxygen in the atmosphere for us to survive for about 0.5 Gy. For roughly 90% of the Earth’s history we couldn’t even breathe the air. And about 10-25% of the time, there have been ice ages so savagely fierce that the glaciers reached the tropics: odds are good that any meat probe landing on solid ground during these periods would rapidly die of exposure. So historically, Earth has only been inhabitable about 8% of the time — assuming you are lucky enough to find some solid ground. Once you factor in the random surface distribution, we’re down to about 2% survivability.”  Almost enough to make you believe in a divine being.  Almost, but not quite.

This sucks: “In 2005, newlyweds Julie and Mike Boyde of Ambridge, Pennsylvania spent their wedding night at a bed and breakfast, where, for the first time since becoming a couple, they had intercourse without a condom. Immediately afterward, Julie was in excruciating pain. Doctors would eventually diagnose her with a rare and incurable disorder known as seminal plasma hypersensitivity, meaning Julie is allergic to her husband’s sperm.”

She goes on to say on a scale of 1 to 10, the pain is about an eight or nine for a full 24-hours after intercourse.  I don’t know if she’s using my pain scale (10 being decapitation, one being napping in a field of daisies), but this allergy sounds pretty awful to have.

Above is our Sun, “photographed using a special filter which matches the specific shade of red light emitted by hydrogen gas. The image was then inverted to enhance the visibility of the Sun’s chromosphere, giving it the ominus blue glow seen above.”

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Science rocks.  If I were a school superintendent I would put tables like this all over every school in my district.

Update: In 2003, Wake Forest University students Nazila Alimohammadi and Anna Clark built this picnic table.

The two women students created the sculpture as part of a public art course taught in the fall by David Finn, associate professor of art. Students in the class were paired up and assigned to work with campus organizations in creating works for public display. “We wanted our project to be fun and functional without a lot of emotional or political content,” Clark says. An aspiring dentist, Alimohammadi had taken several chemistry classes and suggested working with that department. They devised their “Periodic Table” concept — a pun of the familiar Periodic Table of Elements configuration — and the department responded enthusiastically. Alimohammadi did the structural steel work and Clark hand-painted the surface tiles. The piece, which was dedicated in an informal picnic ceremony on April 15, is accurate in every detail, right down to the auxiliary lanthanides and actinides tables that constitute the table’s bench.

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Early this morning, NASA launched the Ares I-X rocket on a sub-orbital test flight.  This is the first new rocket tested in 30 years! BOOYAH!  A cone of cloud formed around the nose as it blasted upward. A beautiful sight under any circumstances. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)

Triboelectrification be damned.  Now that the lightening strikes have passed and there is no worry about static electricity interfering with the onboard systems, NASA is attempting to launch the new $445 million dollar rocket today (eta 10:30a.m.).  The launch test is intended to study how well this rocket design works by gathering data from over 700 onboard sensors.

The 327-foot (100-meter) tall rocket is slated for a two-minute fact-finding flight that will reach a maximum altitude of about 150,000 feet, or 28 miles (46 km), after which it will land in the Atlantic Ocean and boats will collect its spent first stage for study.

Participants in a sensory deprivation experiment reported having hallucinations after just fifteen minutes.

They then put the participants, one by one, in a dark anechoic chamber which shields all incoming sounds and deadens any noise made by the participant. The room had a ‘panic button’ to stop the experiment but apparently no-one needed to use it.

Turns out when we have no external stimuli, we superimpose our own patterns.  [via]

Mars missions from 1960 to present by Bryan Christie Design for IEEE Spectrum’s special report “Why Mars? Why Now?” You can check out a larger version at the IEEE site.  Totally worth it.

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Wait? What?!?  I live in the Pacific Northwest.  Holy Cow!

The Northwest owes its hazard-prone future to what’s happening underground. Beneath a line of volcanoes that stretches from British Columbia to northern California and includes Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier and Mount Shasta, one of the Earth’s plates is wedged beneath another.

The fault line is called the Cascadia subduction zone, and it shakes every few hundred years when the plates shift. The quaking, which can last for minutes, triggers a tsunami that follows 10 to 20 minutes later and reaches heights of up to 15 feet.

Records show that 20 earthquake-generated tsunamis have struck the Northwest in the last 10,000 years — an average of one tsunami every 500 years. The last one happened nearly 310 years ago, on January 26, 1700.

I don’t know about you, but I’m smelling a Hollywood television show titled, maybe something like Earth 2! We could make it about astronauts in search of a second Earth and maybe convince Antonio Sabato Jr. to star in it.  He probably has nothing to do.  Anyways: “European astronomers have found 32 new planets outside our solar system, adding evidence to the theory that the universe has many places where life could develop. Scientists using the European Southern Observatory telescope didn’t find any planets quite the size of Earth or any that seemed habitable or even unusual. But their announcement increased the number of planets discovered outside the solar system to more than 400.”