Saturday, June 13, 2015

Science? There's an app for that


DavidReneke notes that if you are interested in Nasa's Pluto mission, there is an app to follow it.

New Horizons will make the first-ever flyby of Pluto on July 14, zooming within 12,500 kilometres of the dwarf planet’s surface. The Pluto Safari app, which came out last month, keeps tabs on New Horizons, counting its close encounter down to the second, and teaches users about the frigid, distant realm the spacecraft is exploring. Pluto Safari is available for Apple and Android devices, and it’s free. “We didn’t want to put a price on it, because we wanted to get it in the hands of as many people as we could,” said ‪Pedro Braganca of Simulation Curriculum Corp., which developed the app.

Pluto is one of several planetoids of a similar size that circle the earth, but probably no longer considered a planet. This video explains why:




more NASA apps here.
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Physorg reports that the Miratory Dragonfly project is looking for citizen scientists to help

A tandem pair of Common Green Darners (Anax junius) laying eggs. © Dennis Paulson.


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cosmic confusion? Are there or are there not multiuniverses?

the discussion is about the energy of vacuums, and the large errors in calculating that, which can only be solved if there are multiverses...

and then there is this scary idea: the tiny chance that life exists in the universe can be best explained by chance if there are billions and billions of universes. (Similar to the Monkey typing Shakespeare Paradox).

but the real agenda is not mathematics or physics but philosophy;


 Natarajan offered a different interpretation.
"One of the reasons why the multiverse argument actually appeals to me is actually there is no room for agency or deities or any such thing," she said. "I must say that personally I am not uncomfortable with the idea of a multiverse." [Scientists Debate the Inflation Theory Multiverse]


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