Battleship (2012) Review
I was not too hopeful when my daughter convinced me to go watch Battleship during a recent visit to London. The action movie is based on the board game from Hasbro and is directed by Peter Berg who did a good job with the interesting Will Smith superhero Hancock. The real star of Battleship are the special effects and action sequences which are sufficiently exciting to warrant a watch, especially since there are few sci-fi movies involving aliens space-crafts duke-ing it out on the oceans with our naval warships.
Battleship_Poster (Copyright Universal Pictures)
The main actor is Taylor Kitsch who had just recently starred in the mega-bomb John Carter that lost Disney $200M. He just seems awkward in the role of a misfit with high potential who is made to join the navy by his elder brother played by True Blood star Alexander Skarsgard ( he gives a great performance) because it was the only option left. The gorgeous Brooklyn Decker is Taylor’s love interest and plays the daughter of Admiral Liam Neeson in a uncharacteristically dull performance. I’m not too sure why Rihanna is making her film debut in a minor role with lackluster dialog.
SpaceX’s Rendevous with the ISS
Space X’s COTS (Commercial Orbital Transportation Services) Demo Flight 2 is scheduled for Saturday. If the demonstration completes all the objectives set forth by NASA, the Falcon-9/Dragon system will be certified for regular cargo deliveries to the International Space Station. In other words, the United States will finally have a private sector replacement for the Space Shuttle‘s cargo delivery function.
SpaceX HQ (Courtesy of Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño)
While we’re all hopeful for success in this new phase in space exploration, I wonder why we couldn’t have had a proven system in place earlier, before the retirement of the Shuttle. Why are we still dependent on Russia to get our personnel to and from the station? It feels like we’ve set ourselves back, as if it’s 1959 again and we’re once again behind the Russians. I hope we can close the gap again quickly.
First Man on . . . the Asteroid?
Aim for the stars? Sorry, you’re going to have more reasonable expectations. How about Mars? The way we’re going, I’ll be lucky to see that in my lifetime, and I’m only 29. How about a return trip to the Moon? Well, after the way everyone in the media laughed at Newt Gingrich‘s campaign goal of establishing a permanent base on the Moon, I’m guessing the public’s not up for that project.
But don’t despair: for some strange reason, asteroids have really captured everyone’s imagination. Billionaires, space programs, and the public seem to all be happy with aiming for the asteroids. I don’t understand why – surely there is a greater probability of finding all sorts of minerals on the Moon or Mars – but perhaps asteroid are all we have the guts for these days. Plus, they get all sorts of movie attention. Have you ever seen a Hollywood film about us the successful Apollo missions? No, all we got was the failure – Apollo 13. How about a movie about a mission to Mars? Only if we meet something unpleasant there. The only time our space program has any success in the movies is when it comes to asteroids
So, enter NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations) 16, the latest in the training programs for astronauts being prepared to work in deep space, which take place underwater:
Aquarius - the NEEMO lab (courtesy NASA)
The first NEEMO mission occurred in 2001, and they have since been essential in helping us get an idea about what astronauts might need in order to work in such a hostile environment. But what kind of deep space mission are the astronauts of NEEMO 16 being trained for? You guessed it – according to this article from the Telegraph, it’s to land and work on asteroids.
Cleaning Oil Spills with Nanotube Sponges
Of all materials of the future, few have captured the imagination more than carbon nanotubes. Science fiction fans have seen nanotubes as the key to building the stuff of our dreams – from space elevators to cyborg-like synthetic muscles. At the same time, practical, everyday uses have been popping up all over the place, creating a list so long in needed its own Wikipedia page.
Nano Sponge
Well, add another one to the list: cleaning up oil spills. It turns out that, if you add boron into the mix, it creates elbows in the tubes. So, instead of the traditional one-dimensional alignment we’ve already been getting so much fun out of, the fibers get connected together into a three dimensional sponge. Having created a sponge, scientists logically put it to work doing what sponge-like structures do best – soaking stuff up. Made up of carbon, it attracts oil and repels water, and it can absorb up to 100 times its weight in oil according to Bobby Sumpter at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Recording Information From the Brain
The workings of the brain have remained obscure throughout the development of neuroscience, with efforts to probe them often gruesomely coarse and attempts to change them . . . really even worse (from lobotomies to electroshock therapy, just to name the most well-known controversial techniques). That may all soon change.
Pyramidal Neuron in Mouse Cortex (courtesy Nrets at Wikipedia)
So far, examining the brain at the cellular level (as opposed to simply checking which region of the brain is electrically active) has been a surprisingly manual task. While other areas of biology have benefited from robotics and automation, the brain was left to the highly trained hands of brain surgeons. After all, the area is sensitive and merits painstaking care – especially since any proper study of the brain requires it to be a living brain.
Do Black Holes Inhibit Star Formation?
It’s actually more of an open question than I would have thought. At face value, you would expect that the presence of a powerful black hole would disrupt the normal star formation processes, and the evidence is certainly leaning that way. However, there’s still enough uncertainty on the issue to keep some astronomers with the Herschel Space Observatory mission busy (and, I suppose, paid).
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The results from Herschel show that in galaxies 8 to 12 billion light years away (and therefore 8 to 12 billion years ago), star formation slowed dramatically, and the deceleration was greater in galaxies with large central black holes. As would seem logical, the black holes ripped up the coalescing gas, keeping it from gathering into the necessary density. You can read more about it here.
The most striking fact presented by the article is the degree to which star formation has declined since that time. Eight to twelve billion years ago, stars were forming at ten times the rate that they are now, and galaxies were a thousand times brighter than they are now! It’s difficult to really grasp the magnitude of the fact. I mean, we all hear that the universe has cooled over its life, and will continue to get colder, but . . . we don’t often talk about how much darker it’s getting, do we?
I’m sure some astronomer will point out that, if you look at infrared wavelengths, it’s actually quite bright, but the point is that the infrared light was produced long ago. Our light bulbs are going out and a lot of the light is only there because it took this long to get to us. And the damned black holes have been making the matters worse!
Ahem. Anyway, it does make you wonder whether the fundamental constants of the universe were as perfectly tuned as they could have been, doesn’t it?
Tesla Model S Range
Yesterday, Elon Musk and JB Straubel blogged details about the Tesla Model S‘s range and efficiency. You can read their original article here, with details about the test conditions. Incidentally, Elon Musk is not only the CEO of Tesla Motors, but also the CEO and Chief Designer of SpaceX, so our future in space may well rest in his hands. It’s worth paying attention to what he’s up to.
This graph provided by Tesla Motors neatly summarizes the performance of the Model S and the improvement over the Roadster on the critical issue of range:
Range at Constant Speed - Courtesy of Tesla Motors