"Citizen Hearings" on UFOs

These days, allegations of conspiracies and coverups are pretty popular in on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by one Senator's recent 13-hour filibuster in order to obtain an assurance that the government isn't going to use robotic aerial assassins to execute U.S. citizens without trials. But that must make it all the more frustrating for UFOologists, who in many ways are the progenitors of the government conspiracy-coverup meme, because they're getting drowned out by all the noisy newcomers screaming that the Boston Marathon bombing was a "false-flag" operation or that the Pentagon is secretly modifying the weather.

The last time UFOologists succeeded in getting any attention from Congress was in the late 1960s, when then-House minority leader Gerald Ford pushed for hearings after a spate of UFO sightings. The future President chided the U.S. Air Force for keeping its Project Blue Book findings under wraps, and proclaimed that "the American people are becoming alarmed by the UFO stories." But good luck getting anyone in office to issue a similar clarion call today.

Russian Meteor Mayhem

A few years ago, British science writer David Spiegelhalter calculated that the odds of a person on Earth being hit by a falling meteorite are about one in 20 quadrillion. I suspect, however, that those odds weren't much comfort to the 1,200 Russians injured as the result of a 10,000-ton meteor that exploded high over the Ural Mountains just after sunrise on Friday. 

Although initially reported by the Russian Academy of Sciences as smaller and lighter, NASA says the meteor was 55 feet in diameter and weighed 10,000 tons when it entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of about 40,000 miles per hour, and then shattered into pieces between 18 and 32 miles above the Earth's surface. The blast released what the Associated Press describes as "the power of an atomic bomb" and sent fragments raining down upon Chelyabinsk, a Russian city of one million, which lies about 930 miles east of Moscow. (See photos of the aftermath.) The shock wave caused by the meteor shattered an estimated one million square meters of glass, and damaged 3,000 buildings in the city, according to local officials quoted by AP. The Moscow Times reported that it caused an estimated $33 million in damage. Here's a YouTube video shot by a local resident, showing the contrail left in the sky by the meteor, and the sound of the blast.

Check out this video to see more footage of the meteor captured by witnesses:

 

Reanimating Abe Lincoln (With Just a Few Improvements)

  The box office success and critical acclaim garnered by Lincoln present filmmaker Steven Spielberg with an odd dilemma. Unlike other huge hits of recent years — say, Sherlock Holmes or The Avengers — Spielberg can't pick up another big payday by churning out Lincoln 2, because (Spoiler Alert!) his main character dies at the end of the movie. It's a tough problem for a screenwriter to work around.

That is, unless he shifts from historical drama into the realm of science fiction — a genre that Spielberg has worked in a few times, I seem to remember. Here's a plot premise: Lincoln does die, but doctors save and preserve a frozen sample of his body for posterity. Then, 150 years later, scientists figure out how to extract his DNA and use it to clone him. Then they collect every bit of information that they can amass about Lincoln from both his own speeches and historical accounts, digitize it, and transfer all of it to the brain of our Lincoln clone. Voila! The 16th President is reanimated. Plus, maybe he's even better than the original, thanks to the powered exoskeleton, jet pack and augmented-reality contact lenses that they equip him with. 

Here's a more detailed walk through of how cryogenics are used to essentially freeze and preserve living tissue for long periods of time in case you're interested (for perfectly normal and law-abiding reasons, of course...).

  

Giant Squid Caught on Camera at 900 Meters Deep

For the first time ever, the legendary giant squid was filmed in its natural habitat at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. See amazing footage on Discovery Channel's "Monster Squid: The Giant Is Real" on Sunday, Jan. 27 at 8/7c as the season finale of Curiosity.

Scientists worked with broadcasters at Discovery and Japanese-based NHK to seek out the creature at depths of up to 900m using special submersibles in hopes of catching the creature on film.

According to a story from Discovery News:

After around 100 missions, during which they spent 400 hours in the cramped submarine, the three-man crew tracked the creature from a spot some 15 kilometers (nine miles) east of Chichi island in the north Pacific Ocean.

Top 5 Space Discoveries of 2012

The biggest space exploration discovery of 2012 is the one that existed only in the collective consciousness of the Internet rumor mill. After a NASA scientist teased National Public Radio in November by saying that the Mars robotic rover Curiosity had collected data that was going to be "one for the history books,"  some predicted that the space agency might announce the discovery of a life form on Mars. That didn't quite happen — at least not yet. Nevertheless, it was a year that featured other important discoveries. Here are five of what we think may turn out to be the most significant milestones in the exploration of space during 2012.

5. The Milky Way probably has a whole lot of planets

An international team of astronomers, who used an investigative method called gravitational microlensing to spot planets by looking for their gravitational effect upon distant stars. In a January article in Nature, they estimated that there are 160 billion stars with planets orbiting around them in our galaxy. That's about an average of 1.6 planets per star. 

Watch Video: Learn more about the Milky Way

4. A rectangular galaxy

If you're used to thinking of galaxies as flattened discs resembling the Milky Way's graceful spiral, this one may be hard to get your head around. Astronomers already knew that some galaxies actually were ellipsoids, shaped more like rugby balls, while others were completely irregular. But in March, a team of astronomers led by Alister Graham of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia announced the discovery of the dwarf galaxy LEDA 074886, which has a distinctively rectangular shape. According to Technology Review, what Graham describes as an "emerald cut galaxy" lies about 70 million light years from Earth, and may have formed when two disc-shaped galaxies merged. From our vantage point, the combination looks like a rectangle, just as a gigantic stack of pancakes would.

Watch Video: Carl Sagan explains how galaxies are born

Forget Mars, NASA Probe Finds Ice and Organics on Mercury!

NASA has just announced that MESSENGER, the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, has confirmed the presence of ice covered by an unknown organic material inside craters near the planet's north pole - two major building blocks for life!

One current theory is that the ice and organic material could have been delivered to Mercury aboard an asteroid or comet perhaps hundreds of millions of years ago. Of course there’s a lot of painstaking research involved in the findings, as well as other details about this and other theories, so you can get the full story here.

But that's crazy, right? How could there be ice on the closest planet to the sun? It turns out the deep craters shade anything inside from the sun's rays, keeping the temperature cool enough to allow ice to form. It's even possible that liquid water exists on the planet somewhere under the ice!

3 MORE CLIPS! YOUR NEXT MISSION: You Give us 5,000 #FireflyNov11 Tweets, We Give You More Firefly

UPDATE: There are now 3 more clips awaiting your "unlock." CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE PAGE. Keep tweeting #FireflyNov11!

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See this screen shot? It's taken from the upcoming Firefly 10th Anniversary: Browncoats Unite documentary, set to air on the Science Channel this November 11, 2012 at 10pm.

Now, what if we told you there are more than 2 hours of UNUSED footage that WILL NEVER AIR because it just didn't fit into a 1-hour-long documentary? And what if we told you some of it was pretty darn funny, poignant, and just all around amusing? You'd want to see it, right?

So here's your chance: We're asking our fans to show us just how much they want to see this extra footage. We need YOU to send us a tweet to @ScienceChannel with the hashtag #FireflyNov11. And then we need 4,999 more.

This is your first challenge: When we hit 5,000 tweets with the hashtag #FireflyNov11, we'll tweet out a link to the first piece of cut footage. (Just to add a little excitement, I'll tell you it's a roundtable discussion of Nathan Fillion's one-and-only naked scene in the Firefly series.) So get those tweets coming in! We announced this endeavor at New York City Comic Con on October 13th -- and we'll keep releasing more and more content for each challenge met. Be sure to tell all of your Browncoat buddies!

Start tweeting NOW! #FireflyNov11

In Honor of the Nobel Prize: 2012 Best Discoveries

Now that the Emmy’s are over (with wins by Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero and Frozen Planet), and people have long placed the 2012 Grammys, Oscars and Pulitzer Prizes behind them, there’s just one award left. It's the one that's deemed most prestigious by science enthusiasts all over the world and has people sitting at the edge of their seats eagerly waiting to find out who this year’s winners are.

We’re talking about the Nobel Prize, and the announcements are just days away. Heads up, the first announcement, for physiology and medicine, will be announced Mon., Oct. 8 at 5:30 a.m. EDT. (The prize for physics is scheduled for Oct. 9 at 5:45 a.m EDT, and chemistry on Oct. 10 at 5:45 a.m. EDT.) For those who can spare some sleep and want to watch it live, check out the Nobel Prize live webcast!

Watch a Tribute to Astronaut Neil Armstrong (1930-2012)

 

Neil Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) during an Apollo mission. (NASA)

As you can imagine, the news of the passing of Neil Armstrong affected us deeply at Science Channel, so we felt it appropriate to change our regularly scheduled progrmaming to air both favorite and new shows honoring his memory, including When We Left Earth, a comprehensive look back at the Apollo missions and others with stunning restored footage.

When Neil Armstrong left the Earth's atmosphere on July 16, 1969 on his way to the moon 250,000 miles away, he had more than proved himself to have the right stuff to be given the honor, and superhuman feat of being the first person to walk on the moon.

Was Mars Ever Habitable? Curiosity's SAM Instrument Seeks the Answer

After its amazing landing, which felt like it was straight out of a science fiction novel, NASA’s Curiosity rover is now safely on Mars and already at work. “Curiosity was designed to assess whether Mars ever had an environment able to support small life forms called microbes. In other words, its mission is to determine the planet's ‘habitability.’”^[1] To do this, Curiosity is equipped with an on-board laboratory that includes instruments ranging from spectrometers and radiation detectors to environmental and atmospheric sensors. Here’s what I learned from my visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center last week:

Gale Crater, Curiosity’s landing site, is the ideal place to search for evidence of organic compounds on Mars, many of which are the chemical building blocks of life on Earth. Similar to the Grand Canyon (though three times as high!), Gale Crater has exposed layers of rock that NASA hopes will reveal if there ever was life on Mars. Starting at the base of the crater, where the oldest sediments from the planet’s early years can be found, Curiosity will begin roving the area, performing experiments on the crater’s rock layers with its on-board lab.