Science Made Cool

Museum Report: The Udvar-Hazy Center

I'm a sucker for airplane museums. So this account of my visit to the Smithsonian Institution's Udvar-Hazy center in northern Virginia will not be the hard-eyed objective report of a neutral observer. I'm a fanboy. On the other hand, who goes 30 miles into the suburban wilds of northern Virginia to look at airplanes? Fanboys, that's who.

I was accompanied by a reduced-strength Crack Team of museum evaluators, because the other two wanted to do girl stuff downtown.

Getting to and from the Udvar-Hazy Center took more time than our actual museum visit. I understand there's a shuttle bus from the Air & Space Museum on the Mall and I recommend it sight unseen. Even if the bus driver is a cross between Mr. Toad and Mad Max I doubt it can be less fun than coping with suburban Washington traffic.

But why am I blathering about cars? We went out there to look at airplanes! How does the Udvar-Hazy Center stack up against contenders like the Air Force Museum in Dayton, the New England Air Museum, or the mighty Air & Space Museum downtown?

Awesomely. They've got a Concorde. They've got the original Enola Gay (look it up!). They've got the not-quite-Space Shuttle Enterprise. And right in the center of the whole shebang is the long, black, wicked, sleek, jaw-droppingly beautiful shape of an SR-71 spy plane. This is the plane that set a new transcontinental record of 1 hour 4 minutes 20 seconds from Los Angeles to Washington -- on its retirement flight. When it landed they recorded the new record (it averaged over 2100 mph) then wheeled the plane into a museum.

Whew. Hot flash there. Besides sheer crowd-pleasing awesomeness the collection has much to reward a serious aviation-history buff. There are several unique (or nearly-so) examples of German and Japanese experimental craft from the last days of World War II: a Japanese Ohka piloted missile, a Komet rocketplane, and part of a Horten flying wing (which inspired the plane in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark with the boxing-obsessed chief mechanic). There are also some Soviet MiGs from the Air Force's old "aggressor squadron."

And for the younger set there are FLIGHT SIMULATORS! Run by an outside contractor (so you have to pay), there's a passive "thrill ride" version and an active, you're-in-control jet combat simulator. Even without the help of a rear-seat gunner our Crack Team managed one confirmed kill and one "possible."

Jim and the Crack Team give it two thumbs up. Information is here.

What Happens When an Elephant Dies?

The answer's simple: other animals eat it. As part of an upcoming documentary film, Channel 4 filmed an elephant carcass in Tsavo West National Park (Kenya) for a week as scavengers reduced it to a pile of bones.  

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h/t to Mary Roach! (She always finds the best stuff...)

Best Toys List

I love this. Jonathan Liu at Wired's GeekDad posted a list describing five classic traditional kids toys. The kinds of things kids have played with for a century or more. Your grandfather -- heck, your great-great grandfather probably played with these. 

His list? 

1. Stick

2. Box

3. String

4. Tube

5. Dirt

I do note the absence of that perennial classic, Rock. Maybe there were too many liability issues to include it.

More Planets Than You Can Shake A Stick At

That's the one-sentence summary of the Kepler orbital telescope's preliminary results from a survey of some 156,000 stars. So far, Kepler's found 1,235 planet candidates, including 68 roughly Earth-sized and 19 supergiants. More interestingly, 54 planets were orbiting in the "habitable zone" around their parent stars (i.e. the region where temperatures allow liquid water) -- and of those, 5 were Earth-sized worlds.

Okay, cool. What does this mean?

Well, it means there are a lot of planets out there. Bear in mind that Kepler detects planets by measuring the slight dimming of a star's light caused by something passing across its disk. That means that the 1,200-odd worlds are just those with orbits that happen to take them between their parent stars and the Kepler telescope. Presumably the Kepler discoveries represent only a tiny fraction of the actual number of stars it observed that actually have planets. This, in turn, means there are literally millions of worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy which could be suitable for life to evolve on.

Of course, this just raises problems. Plugging the Kepler results into the Drake Equation means there are plenty of possibly life-bearing worlds . . . so where are they?

If there are lots of places life can evolve, but we don't see any evidence of intelligent life elsewhere, there must be a bottleneck somewhere. Maybe multicellular life is a lot more rare than we think. Maybe intelligence hasn't shown up very often (Earth got along without any intelligent species until we came along). We just don't know. But we're learning more about what we don't know.

Here's more on the Kepler results from Phil Plait.

A Model Antikythera Mechanism. Now in Lego

A working Lego model of the famous ancient Greek astronomical calculator, showing how it calculated the lunar and solar eclipse cycles. The original device was much thinner, but that's because the Greeks used custom gears. The model builders were stuck using off-the shelf plastic Lego gears, and had to be more creative to get their drives to make the same calculations.