A crimson rainfall in India at the turn of our most recent century has been rumored to feature properties that we’ve never seen on Earth before or since. New research demonstrates that the cells of the rain can replicate in extremely hostile environments. The results also suggest that the rain might have originated in extragalactic dust clouds.

This only ends one of two ways. 1) the rain creates the zombie disease outbreak which changes our lives (and since it will be local to India: Bollywood films) forever 2) this is the first sign of the coming of Galactus.

[arxiv.org via Kurzweil]

A Portuguese professor believes force fields enveloping space ships that take us to Mars could be a reality.

…a mini-magnetosphere stretching a few hundred metres beyond the craft could be used in conjunction with the heavy shields that would stop neutral and high-energy radiation from frying the astronauts. “If you go out in the rain, you can wear a coat – but you can also carry an umbrella,” she says. “That’s what a mini-magnetosphere is – a plasma umbrella held up by magnetic fields. Even if it screened only 50 per cent of the solar particles, it could still help protect a big-mass shield, enabling it to be lighter,” she says. That would allow the craft to carry less fuel.

Bamford is in talks with the European Space Agency and NASA about the possibilities her team’s experiment raises, though she can’t give many details at this stage. “There are confidentiality and patent issues,” she says. What she will say is that NASA agrees that the old assumptions about the limits of magnetic shielding need to be revisited. “They want to work with us on this – a solution to their biggest problem with crewed exploration of space.”

Awesome.

[New Scientist]

Everyday this week…Brett Rounsaville brings us the Weirdest Disasters ever to strike down man or beast.

Monday and Tuesday we talked with the Ghost of Disasters Past, today we’re going to have words with the Ghost of Disasters Future. Strap in folks, it’s going to be a dickens of a ride.

NASA says come 2013 the sun will be “waking up from a deep slumber,” resulting in crazy solar storms. How crazy? 20 times the economic damage of Hurricane Katrina crazy! (Why the sun has been such a lazy narcoleptic hydrogen ball for the past many millennia was not discussed.)

The point is this: It is entirely possible that the resulting solar flares could disable satellites, explode transformers and cause widespread EMP related power outages. (In other words, it could be the catalyst for…BUM BUM BAAAA, The Night of a Million Conceptions!)

(Anti-baby) policymakers, researchers, legislators and reporters have gathered in Washington DC to share ideas about space weather and how to mitigate the coming disaster for the last 4 years in a row. That means AT LEAST 96 hours has been dedicated to solving this crisis, so everything should be fine everyone. Just go on about buying your soon-to-be-bricked-by-solar-radiation Apple products and stop trying to ruin the economy with your money-saving antics.

Seriously though, how much would it suck to be tossed back into the dark ages by the sun. (Someone with a lesser grasp of English, like say, Alanis Morissette, might even call that ironic.) All I have to say is, NASA better figure this one out. I don’t want to have to learn how to plow a field or ride a horse…and I sure as heck don’t like the sound of the word fiefdom.

What do you think? How would you handle life without electronics? Are you a hole-up-in-a-bunker kind of person or an organic gardener/Ted Nuggent fan?

Here is one paragraph for you to read:

“Accordingly, our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.” So concludes Nikodem Poplawski at Indiana University in a remarkable paper about the nature of space and the origin of time.

If that doesn’t make you want to read the rest of this post, you’re a real silly goose.

[Technology Review]

There’s some kooky stuff going on inside the rings of Saturn. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has identified distinctive giant propellers that could be created by a new class of moon.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft spotted the distinctive structures inside some of Saturn’s rings, marking the first time scientists have managed to track the orbits of individual objects from within a debris disk like the one that makes up Saturn’s complicated ring system.

“Observing the motions of these disk-embedded objects provides a rare opportunity to gauge how the planets grew from, and interacted with, the disk of material surrounding the early sun,” said the study’s co-author Carolyn Porco, one of the lead researchers on the Cassini imaging team based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. “It allows us a glimpse into how the solar system ended up looking the way it does.”

Chew on that.

[Space]

In 1996 a team of NASA scientists published a study saying the they’d found signs of life on a Martian meteorite that crashed to Earth in 1984. They were summarily dismissed by many.

14 years later, as science has caught up, their findings don’t seem so far fetched.

Could we have proof of life on the Red Planet right here?

[Pop Sci]

Scientists at The University of Sheffield have captured the sounds of the exterior layer of the sun known as the solar cornea. If you ever wanted to know what hell might sound and look like this is the video for you.

You can get a clearer look at what’s making the sound here, and check out the full press release for more information.

It’s either that or we’ve begun principal photography on the long-awaited Ghost Busters spin off Slimer Goes To Space.

[Daily Mail via NASA]

Six men have sequestered themselves in a Russian Bunker for a 520-day experiment to study how a mission to Mars would effect astronauts.

The experiment will simulate the isolation of space travel and offer limited access to the outside world. Much like an actual space mission the scientists will only be able to communicate with “Mission Control” when they need assistance. Unlike an actual space mission the researchers will also be participating in simulated Inter-planetary chess with chess master Anatoly Karpov.

Participants can end the study at any time by simply walking out, which is a bit of a cop out. If nobody leaves please join us back here in about a year for our follow-up story: “Russian Researchers Bugger, Eat Each Other.”

[NPR]

So you find a totally sweet cone-shaped rock but can’t shake the idea that it’s somehow special. Where to do you go to get clarity on what the geological oddity really is?

If you are Oregon couple Donald and Debbie Wesson you haul it down to a county fair, which leads you down a path of academic trail to realizing you’ve got your hands on a meteorite.

Wesson finally began asking around after watching a television program about meteorites. He took the rock to a local county fair in Castle Rock, Washington in the summer of 2009, where he spoke with a member of the Southern Washington Mineralogical Society.

The find was referred to Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., where initial sample tests showed it was probably a meteorite. Final confirmation came from the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University, which classified the Morrow County meteorite as an L6 ordinary chondrite that had been highly shocked (S5) but minimally weathered (W1).

The latest find represents a relatively common type of meteorite, according to Melinda Hutson, a planetary scientist at Portland State University who helped make the classification. But, she added that it has several intriguing features.

Also, they got an Elephant Ear and rode the Flying Dutchman.

[Space]

In case anyone was worried.

Scientists from the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute, and Boston University suggest that the ribbon of enhanced emissions of energetic neutral atoms, discovered last year by the NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of the approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble. If this hypothesis is correct, IBEX is catching matter from a hot neighboring interstellar cloud, which the Sun might enter in a hundred years.

We are unclear on what might happen when the sun passes into the cloud, but if it means this song is relevant again we are willing to deal with the side effects.

[Science Daily]

Launched in 1977 and containing the ultimate Carl Sagan mixtape, The Voyager probes have represented our message in a bottle to alien races and civilizations unknown.

But for the first time, some believe they are talking back.

NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.

But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format.

In late April, the signals sent back from Voyager 2 suddenly arrived in an unknown format. Unable to decipher the data stream and completely baffled by the cause for the shift in how Voyager 2 communicates with its Earth-bound team, NASA scientists have for the time being instructed the probe to send only information on its operational health and status while they get to the bottom of the sudden and strange behavior.

Alien experts are already theorhizing that alien tech has reprogrammed the Voyager and is attempting contact. Then again, what else would alien experts say.

Or as Steve Martin once found out, maybe they just want more Chuck Berry.

[Daily Telegraph]

We are proud to introduce our new YouTube series, WeirdThingsTV. If you dig this, please feel free to subscribe on YouTube so you don’t miss an episode.

Next clips will come out Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

There has long been a school of thought that bacteria from Earth could contaminate possible life on Mars should be take a man made trip to the Red Planet. However, a new study out of the University of Central Florida says no matter how many smallpox blankets we bring, it is unlikely to make a difference.

Ultimately it is unlikely such microorganisms will be able to replicate once on the Martian surface, the research suggests.

“Without replication, terrestrial microorganisms are very unlikely to contaminate a landing site,” Andrew Schuerger, one of the study’s researchers, told SPACE.com. “Thus, it is unlikely that spacecraft microbes will compromise the search for organics or the search for life on Mars.”

Mars has been one of the primary places that scientists have expanded their quest for extraterrestrial life, and while Curiosity is not intended to be a life-seeking mission, it is still important for a rover to have minimal bacterial impact on the red planet.

Screw it, the first man on Mars should be stained with BBQ sauce and sporting an unseemly running nose while wiping his hands with red rocks.

[Space.com]

Everything dies. Somethings just die, only to be reborn as a deadly threat to those still living.

Everyone say hello to the Zombiesat, a term used by engineers to describe satellites which have lost communication with the ground are now just stumbling around as a shell of their former selves, posing a collision threat to other functional orbiters. So what are we to do with such a menace? Separate the head and destroy the brain?

Nope, turns out you just have to blow them higher into orbit so they either crash into each or slowly descend back into orbit and eventually burn up in the atmosphere.

Or… you could sign on to this awesome plan

Some more exotic measures involving tethers and other props have been proposed, Johnson said, but aren’t yet feasible.

For getting rid of very small pieces of space junk, there are two favorite ideas, he said. One involves shooting lasers at the objects to push them into lower-altitude orbits so they fall back down to Earth more quickly.

“That has technical, economic, as well as policy issues,” Johnson said.

Policy issues include a possible violation on the Total Badass Restriction Act of 1986.

[Space]

Not going to lie to you folks, space is big. Like really big.

To get from one point to another you’re going to need more than just a full tank of gas and a Snapple pinched between your thighs because someone decided to use the cup holders for loose change and a half-drank, week-old Coke bottle.

Luckily, the recent discovery that some asteriods contain water compounds could mean the components of the water ice could be broken down and reassembled into rocket fuel.

“Water is the main component in how you might make propellants,” said Jerry Sanders, leader of in-situ resource utilization at NASA’s Lunar Surface Systems Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “If you’re going to go repeatedly to an asteroid, then the ability to basically start setting up gas stations could be extremely beneficial.”

Researchers announced last week that they had found definitive proof of frozen water, along with organic compounds, coating the surface of the large asteroid 24 Themis in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Previously, scientists had believed that asteroids there were too close to the sun to harbor water without it evaporating away.

Could be a big boon for longer voyages. No word yet on how hydrogen and oxygen could be reassembled to create Slim Jims.

[Space]