A New Zealand man was Monday being hailed as the first amateur photographer to capture an image of another solar system, after he photographed the star Beta Pictoris using a 10-inch 25cm telescope at his home in Auckland.Rolf Olsen, who moved to New Zealand in 2003 from Denmark, put the photograph on his website, sparking congratulations and amazement from members of the scientific community around the world.”I realized it was a special thing but I didn’t realize it would generate such a stir,” Olsen, who lives in Titirangi west of central Auckland, told news website stuff.co.nz.

via Amateur Astronomer Snaps Historic Photo Of Another Galaxy | Fox News.

via @SteveMartinToGo on Twitter. Yes, Steve Martin is a) on Twitter and b) apparently at least links Fox News.

I enjoyed the unlikely caption under the photo:

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Here’s 30 seconds of liftoff of Apollo 11 at 500fps, so it takes 8+ minutes.  Good narration.  Very entertaining!

Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch (HD) Camera E-8 on Vimeo on Vimeo

HT: The Aerospace Genius.

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UK drivers had better stay under that speed limit, because the traffic authorities are watching… from outer space. According to The Telegraph, an American company called PIPS Technology has developed a system that uses two cameras on the ground and one mounted on a satellite in orbit to catch speeders.

via Satellites to issue speeding tickets from space – SciTechBlog – CNN.com Blogs.

This is entirely feasible now, with toll tags and the like.  Wisely, I think they’d rather have the tolls than a few fines and empty roads.

Putting big heavy snoopers into space is very very expensive, and totally optional.  Use an optional program against a populace (even one that’s guilty) is a really good way to get that one, and its more useful cousins, unfunded.

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Awesome.

Via the Aerospace Genius.

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Chen’s conclusion is consistent with what’s been found with processing emotions in both the face and the voice. There, an emotion from one sense modulates how the same emotion is perceived in another sense, especially when the signal to the latter sense is ambiguous.

The article says something about this being ‘unsuspected’, which is goofy, but the rest is very interesting.

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I know it’s them (Well, Sky & Telescope knows, and that’s enough for me).

More from Wired:

In what’s called a planetary conjunction, the two planets —the brightest in the night sky — will appear extremely close, separated by only the width of a finger held at arm’s length. They won’t be this close together and well-placed for evening viewing again until May 2013.

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SciGuy: A Texan definition of a planet
• Therefore, a planet must be any star-orbiting, non-fusing celestial body larger than the smallest sphere containing TEXAS.

Read it all, and enjoy.  I’m not an astronomer but it makes sense to me.

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I bring it up because it’s now available online, and the articles are viewable in Low-Res .pdf format for free, which is all I need to a good laugh. It’s good research-geek fun, and I hope you try it out!

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My prayers answered — a fire ant virus

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has recently identified a virus that kills red fire ants, and the agency has begun the process of finding a commercial partner to develop the virus into a pesticide.

Read the article. I hope this happens soon enough for the Horney Toads to make a recovery.

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The common view that nerves transmit impulses through electricity is wrong and they really transmit sound, according to a team of Danish scientists.

The Copenhagen University researchers argue that biology and medical textbooks that say nerves relay electrical impulses from the brain to the rest of the body are incorrect.

“For us as physicists, this cannot be the explanation,” said Thomas Heimburg, an associate professor at the university’s Niels Bohr Institute. “The physical laws of thermodynamics tell us that electrical impulses must produce heat as they travel along the nerve, but experiments find that no such heat is produced.”

Hmm. I’m not buying it. Too many lectures involving micro-electrodes measuring electrical nerve impulses, and all that.

And, what about local anesthetics? Are they just sound-deadening?

The scientists, whose work is in the Biophysical Society’s Biophysical Journal, suggested that anesthetics change the melting point of the membrane and make it impossible for their theorized sound pulses to propagate.

So, anyone have a vacuum chamber and a nerve? Me, I’m sticking with the whole saltatory-conduction thing.

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