This is certainly not new, but I only saw it for the first time yesterday when a friend at work shot me the link. There are a couple parts of the video that are really quite amazing - watch for the part where the robot-dog-from-hell is on ice, for one.

Boston Dynamics BigDog

Lots of cool stuff going on in the skies this week. There’s a new red spot on Jupiter indicating the previously white storm clouds have begun to spun higher in the Jupiter atmosphere to heights near to that of the great red spot. The great red spot has been the defining feature of Jupiter since I was a kid, the fact that it’s now been joined by another huge red spot is a reminder that our solar system is not static. In other news, the Phoenix lander is scheduled to make it’s attempted landing at the north pole of Mars tommorow at 7:53pm. Since about half of the missions sent to Mars have failed, there are a lot of scientists holding their breath right about now. It’s certainly exciting, and landing in this northern region of Mars where there is a lot of ice may help to finally answer the big question - did Mars ever harbor life? Might it yet?

The Mars rover, Spirit stumbled over pure silica deposits. Literally stumbled, because Spirit is dragging its broken wheel everywhere it goes. The silica is evidence of hot water at some time in the past. On earth, these areas (hydrothermal vents) teem with life. More investigation at this location is warranted.

I’m already hearing people suggest that the terrible earthquake in China was unprecedented and one idiot is passing around false information stating that there are no fault lines in the area. In fact, I heard someone say they “heard on NPR” that there hadn’t been an earthquake there in 1500 years! Folks, I’ve gotta tell you - the area is certainly tectonically active, and anyone that tells you different is itching for a fight. An earthquake killed almost 10,000 people in nearly the same exact place in 1933! Most of the area is prone to mudslides and these may be obscuring some of the evidence of faults in the ancient past, but here’s a map of historic seismicity in the area since 1990. You can compare that with NY which has a relatively low amount of seismic activity since 1990 here.

You may already know that Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft is orbiting the moon right now taking hi definition images of the surface looking for evidence of frozen water, and studying the moon’s gravitational field. NASA can tell you more about it, or you can go straight over to the KAGUYA image gallery and click on HDTV for some images.

Actually, Canadafreepress is reporting that data from a recent peer-reviewed journal article [PDF] published in Climate Dynamics by Håkan Grudd of Stockholm University, Sweden confirms a general warming over the last 200 years. Global warming adherents shouldn’t get too excited about this, however because the study looks at dendrochronology (tree ring data) of the Scots Pine for the last 1500 years and the findings support a claim for a general COOLING trend of -0.3 degrees C over that time. The paper concludes that the late twentieth century is not exceptionally warm in the record; The warmest period over the past 1500 years was a 200 year span centered around 1000AD when there weren’t any SUVs around to take the heat for it (pun intended)! The findings should not come as a surprise to anyone interested in earth history. The Earth is currently in an interglacial period known as the Holocene. If past interglacials are any guide, we should be heading into another glacial period soon. It is important to note that while the findings of this researcher support a general cooling trend, they do not confirm or deny human impact on the environment in the short term. It is still possible that humans may yet create a climatic change on an order previously unseen in the last 1500 years and that we will only discover our impact after it becomes too late to do anything about it.

This story gives me hope that we may see just a bit more Star Trek tech in our lifetimes. Wired is reporting on a new medical test just approved by the FDA that physicians should be able to use that can identify respiratory viruses. The tester accepts a sample swab of RNA from an ill patient, converts it to DNA, performs polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to create copies, mixes the amplified DNA with color tags that will only bind to a specific virus, and identifies the virus and displays the results on-screen. The article mentions a New England Journal of medicine report that suggests that physicians get flu diagnoses wrong 83% of the time.

Non Prophet recently posted about The Nazca Lines which are strange geometric forms drawn in the desert in Nazca, Peru some in the shape of animals, so large that they are not visible in their entirety from the ground. There have been a multitude of proposed theories attempting to explain the creation of these lines over the years, and I found that this site lays them all out pretty well. The most interesting theory, to me is that laid out by the Nasca Lines Project which postulates that the glyphs indicate (at their terminal points) the location of geophysical faults where water seeps to the surface. Water would have been *very* important to those peoples living in this desert environment. In fact, it is only due to the extremely dry climate that the lines are still evident today. The theory is the work of David Johnson of NY, a photographer, former HS teacher of 25 years, and adjunct professor of Anthropology at the University of Mass. More detailed analysis is available on his site under ‘water research’.