Category: Uncategorized

Dawn Spacecraft Becomes First to Orbit a Dwarf Planet | NASA

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/march/nasa-spacecraft-becomes-first-to-orbit-a-dwarf-planet/index.html

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has become the first mission to achieve orbit around a dwarf planet. The spacecraft was approximately 61,000 kilometres from Ceres when it was captured by the dwarf planet’s gravity at about 4:39 a.m. PST (7:39 a.m. EST) Friday.

“Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an asteroid and later a dwarf planet,” said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission director at JPL. “Now, after a journey of 4.9 billion kilometers and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres home.”

In addition to being the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet, Dawn also has the distinction of being the first mission to orbit two extraterrestrial targets. From 2011 to 2012, the spacecraft explored the giant asteroid Vesta, delivering new insights and thousands of images from that distant world. Ceres and Vesta are the two most massive residents of our solar system’s main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Open Source Earth Wind Patterns & Cyclone Marcia

Cameron Beccario created a beautiful live visualisation of the Earth’s wind, ocean and other weather patterns, using publicly available data. The full source code is all available at via Github – so a school could set up their own server for this and do all kinds of funky work!

Live site is up at earth.nullschool.net – the link will get you zoomed in to Australia but you can pan and zoom to anywhere you like!

cyclone-marcia-lam-earth-nullschoolAs I write this post you can see Cyclone Marcia (category 5) coming into the Central Queensland coast, and also Cyclone Lam east of Darwin in the Northern Territory. I took a snapshot which you can see above, but the live site is even prettier with the motion.

 

 

Google boss warns of ‘forgotten century’ with email and photos at risk | The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf

Digital material including key historical documents could be lost forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Cerf.

[…]

Inventing new technology is only half the battle, though. More difficult still could be navigating the legal permissions to copy and store software before it dies. When IT companies go out of business, or stop supporting their products, they may sell the rights on, making it a nightmarish task to get approval.

“To do this properly, the rights of preservation might need to be incorporated into our thinking about things like copyright and patents and licensing. We’re talking about preserving them for hundreds to thousands of years,” said Cerf.

Lizard Moving From Eggs to Live Birth | National Geographic

A National Geographic news article from a few years ago, but awesomely interesting:

Along the warm coastal lowlands of New South Wales, the yellow-bellied three-toed skink lays eggs to reproduce. But individuals of the same species living in the state’s higher, colder mountains are almost all giving birth to live young.

Evolutionary records show that nearly a hundred reptile lineages have independently made the transition from egg-laying to live birth in the past, and today about 20 percent of all living snakes and lizards give birth to live young only.

So with this particular skink variety, we can see the transition as it’s happening. As the article explains, the transition causes a potential nutrient problem for the baby skinks (less calcium as there’s no egg), but the mother skink’s body solves this already:

“Now we can see that the uterus secretes calcium that becomes incorporated into the embryo—it’s basically the early stages of the evolution of a placenta in reptiles,” Stewart explained.

These observations also show how seemingly complicated transitions in life on earth turn out to in fact be relatively small changes that can be achieved with minor adaptations.

Sometimes, when you [have the opportunity to] look closer, things are actually simpler.

Finland scraps cursive writing lessons in schools | ABC

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-03/finland-scraps-cursive-writing-lessons-in-schools/6066826

Finland is scrapping cursive writing lessons in schools from next year and will instead teach children how to type.

On consideration, I think it’s good to have this discussion. Of course students need to be able to write legibly, and at a fair speed. But cursive writing is not the only way to achieve that.

Keyboard and mouse skills are very important as well – the awesome GCompris suite (approx age range 2-10) has games for even very young kids, getting to grips with the mouse and learning their way around the keyboard. Kids love it.