The Man in the Iron Mask.

As seen in the comments of this strange story, writer, inventor, and science-fiction pioneer Hugo Gernsback shows off The Isolator, a Spaceballs-like contraption designed to allow someone to read and write in peace, in the July 1925 issue of Science and Invention. What could possibly go wrong?

Earth, you are On Notice.

“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twenty-first century came the great disillusionment.“

And we know exactly whose fault it is. In response to the 35-year-old “WOW signal“, we the people of Earth have apparently chosen as our herald Stephen Colbert, whose response above will be broadcast in the direction of its origin by National Geographic via the Arecibo radio telescope.

Hrm….isn’t the Mighty Colbert a bit too droll for alien intelligences? I fear this will set off a Douglas Adams-style miscommunication that will end very badly for all parties involved. Second, why would any alien race be able to make sense of Prometheus? There was no sense there to be had.

Phoenix Star Factory | The Perfect Sun.

“These findings provide new insight into how the most massive galaxies in the Universe may have acquired their stars,’ said Michael McDonald, a scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who led the study…’Our current understanding is that these massive galaxies assemble via mergers with smaller galaxies, but in this one cluster it looks like cooling-induced starbursts may be an equally important process.’“

Take that, Ed McMahon and Simon Cowell: Astronomers identify a galaxy cluster that is spewing out 3820 new stars a year, the fastest rate in the known universe. “Comparatively, the Milky Way forms stars at an average rate of just one solar mass (one star equal in mass to Earth’s Sun) per year. Other galaxies form an average of one star every 20 years.“

“The results were a big surprise. ‘We were shocked,’ says Kuhn. The sun doesn’t bulge much at all. It is 1.4m kilometres across, but the difference between its diameter at the equator and between the poles is only 10 kilometres.” Meanwhile closer to home, after fifty years of effort, astronomers conclude that our sun is the “most perfectly round natural object known in the universe.…Scaled to the size of a beachball, that difference is less than the width of a human hair.“

Roll Over Einstein? Not so fast.

“‘We tried to find all possible explanations for this,’ the report’s author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening. ‘We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t.
When you don’t find anything, then you say “well, now I’m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this”.’“

As broke everywhere last week, CERN appears to find evidence of neutrinos moving faster than light(!) — time travel possible which would, well, basically rewrite the laws of physics and make. (See what I did there? Anyway, kind of a big deal!)

Fermilab is currently trying to reproduce the results, but for now, the scientific community is, shall we say, skeptical. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think it will be perceived in retrospect as an embarrassment that this claim received so much publicity–the inevitable consequence of posting a preprint on the Web.“

Update: Sorry, aspiring Marty McFlys: As expected, rumors of relativity’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Here’s the rub: “[T]he distance that the neutrinos had to travel in their reference frame is longer than the distance that the neutrinos had to travel in our reference frame, because in our reference frame, the detector was moving towards the source.” Thus, thte experiment “helps to reinforce relativity rather than question it.”

World of Enzymecraft | Taming the Dragon.

“Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in this week’s paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before.” Score one for spatial reasoning: Using the game Foldit, online gamers manage to decipher a enzyme structure that has eluded scientists for a decade — in three weeks. “Cracking the enzyme ‘provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs’, says the study, referring to the medication to keep people with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) alive.“

On the subject of HIV, it looks like the enemy of our enemy is our friend: In a stunning feat of gene therapy, scientists have used a disabled version of HIV to successfully defeat leukemia. “Mr. Ludwig’s doctors have not claimed that he is cured — it is too soon to tell — nor have they declared victory over leukemia on the basis of this experiment, which involved only three patients…But scientists say [this] may signify a turning point in the long struggle to develop effective gene therapies against cancer…In essence, the team is using gene therapy to accomplish something that researchers have hoped to do for decades: train a person’s own immune system to kill cancer cells.”

We’ve Got a Friend.

“Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth’s point of view.” By way of a friend, NASA researchers have discovered Earth’s very own trojan asteroid. (It’s the green circle above.) “Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet…The asteroid’s orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles.“

For the Long Haul.

“Look back 100 years. If you could have had James Clerk Maxwell and Guglielmo Marconi and Albert Einstein sit around a lunch table in the early 1900s, they would have had all the math necessary to create an iPhone. But there’s nothing that they could have done to characterize the integrated circuits, the satellites, the communication links or the Internet, to draw a plan that would have led them to an iPhone until Apple introduced it 100 years later. That’s how I see where we are with this.“

From the folks who brought you the Internet, DARPA announces the 100-Year Starship Study, offering $500,000 in seed money to whomever comes up with the best plan for developing the technology needed for interstellar travel. “To stimulate discussion on the research possibilities, DARPA officials will hold a symposium that brings together astrophysicists, engineers and even sci-fi writers so they can brainstorm what it would take to make this starship enterprise a success.“

Turn the Machines Back On!

“‘We’re not completely out of the woods yet, but everybody’s smiling here,’ the institute’s chief executive officer, Tom Pierson, told me today.” Also in good space exploration news, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array is now back online thanks to a wave of private donations. “Among the contributors are Jodie Foster…science-fiction writer Larry Niven…and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders…’It is absolutely irresponsible of the human race not to be searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence,’ Anders wrote in a note accompanying his contribution.“

A Light in the Deepest Dark.

“‘We think there are only about 100 bright quasars with redshift higher than 7 over the whole sky,’ concludes Daniel Mortlock, the leading author of the paper. ‘Finding this object required a painstaking search, but it was worth the effort to be able to unravel some of the mysteries of the early Universe.’“

European astronomers find the farthest quasar yet discovered, 12.9 billion light years away and dating to only 770 million years after the Big Bang. “This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe.“

The “Worms From Hell.”

“‘This is telling us something brand new,’ said Onstott, whose pioneering work in South Africa over the past decade has revolutionized the understanding of microbial life known generally as extremophiles, which live in places long believed to be uninhabitable. ‘For a relatively complex creature like a nematode to penetrate that deep is simply remarkable.‘”

From a few weeks ago and languishing in the bookmarks, scientists find nematodes a mile below the Earth’s surface, raising the possibility of similar life on other worlds. The spice must flow… “The two lead researchers…said the discovery of creatures so far below ground, with nervous, digestive and reproductive systems, was akin to finding ‘Moby Dick in Lake Ontario.‘”