Categories
GeekWire

How Neil deGrasse Tyson got out-geeked

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts “StarTalk” from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (Credit: National Geographic Channel)

Few people can geek out to a movie harder than astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, but he met his match when it came to Thor’s hammer.

Tyson, who’s the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium as well as the host of such TV shows as “StarTalk” and “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” is likely to tell the tale during his sold-out lectures at Seattle’s Paramount Theater on Sept. 21 and 22.

He may also touch on the other Hollywood reality checks he’s conducted over the years – like the time he went on a Twitter rant over the scientific inaccuracies in “Gravity,” or complained about a screwed-up sky in “Titanic” (which led director James Cameron to correct the scene for the film’s re-release in 3-D).

After all, the title of his talk is “An Astrophysicist Goes to the Movies.”

The tempest over Mjolnir, the hammer wielded by Thor (played by Chris Hemsworth in the Marvel movies), marks one of the rare times when Tyson admits he was out-geeked at the movies.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

NASA drops hints about Europa’s hidden ocean

Europa
An image from NASA’s Galileo orbiter shows Europa’s icy surface, crisscrossed by reddish-brown streaks of radiation-darkened salt. (Credit: NASA / JPL / Ted Stryk)

NASA is gearing up to unveil “surprising evidence” of activity that may be related to the presence of a watery ocean beneath the icy surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

In a media advisory sent out today, the space agency said the evidence comes from the Hubble Space Telescope, in the form of images taken during a “unique Europa observing campaign.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Scientists worry about Trump’s climate views

Stephen Hawking
British physicist Stephen Hawking delved into the mysteries of the solar system and beyond in a Discovery Channel series titled “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.” (Credit: Discovery Channel)

An open letter from 375 scientists is voicing concern about GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s views on climate change – and urging the United States not to cancel its commitment to last year’s Paris climate agreement, as Trump has said he would do.

Among the signers of the letter published today are British physicist Stephen Hawking, billionaire philanthropist James Simons, 30 Nobel laureates and nine University of Washington professors.

The Paris pact was adopted by the United States and more than 190 other nations last December, and formally ratified by President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping this month. It lays out commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and keep average global temperatures from rising by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Libertarian completes science-quiz quartet

Four candidates
Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump and Libertarian Gary Johnson respond to Science Debate’s presidential policy quiz. (GeekWire illustration)

Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson may not be on stage for this year’s televised presidential debates, but he is getting his say on America’s top issues relating to science and technology, health and the environment – thanks to Science Debate.

Johnson was the last of four presidential hopefuls to respond to Science Debate’s 20-question policy quiz. His answers went online today. Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump and the Green Party’s Jill Stein weighed in a week earlier.

Shawn Otto, who chairs the ScienceDebate.org initiative, said in a news release that the candidates’ responses “provide a window into the role evidence from science plays in their decision-making” – but he emphasized that the voters shouldn’t rely solely on the quiz answers.

“Now we need journalists and the public to press these candidates for more specifics,” Otto said. “How reasonable are their proposals, given the known evidence? What relative roles do ideology and evidence seem to play in their thinking? These are important considerations in electing an executive who will have the power to set policy, guide and enforce regulations, influence research investments, sign treaties, inspire students, encourage innovation, approve laws, manage immigration, and commit soldiers to battle.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Drone industry council meets for first time

Drone in North Cascades
Freefly Systems’ Alta drone takes to the air in Washington’s North Cascades. (Credit: Freefly Systems)

Washington state officials convened the first meeting of an industry council focusing on drones and related businesses today, after a seminar on the promise and potential perils of unmanned aerial vehicles.

“Focusing on this isn’t just about aerospace and UAVs, it’s about a whole variety of industries that benefit,” Brian Bonlender, director of the Washington State Department of Commerce, told a gathering of business executives, researchers and other experts at the offices of K&L Gates in downtown Seattle.

About a dozen of the attendees went from the large-group gathering to the inaugural meeting of the Unmanned Systems Industry Council, led by John Thornquist, head of Washington state’s Office of Aerospace.

Drones, also known as unmanned aircraft systems or UAS, are expected to have an impact on fields ranging from package delivery to agriculture, media production and public safety.  Nationwide, the UAS industry is expected to create 100,000 jobs and add more than $82 billion to the U.S. economy over the decade ahead.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

‘Snowden’ rallies whistleblower’s defenders

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in "Snowden"
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Edward Snowden in the movie “Snowden.” (Credit: Open Road Films)

Whether you see him as a patriot or a traitor, it’s a big week for Edward Snowden, who was forced to seek asylum in Russia after revealing the magnitude of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and a host of other supporters have just launched a full-court press to get Snowden a pardon from President Barack Obama. And Oliver Stone’s biopic, “Snowden,” is hitting theaters across the country and around the world – even in Russia.

GeekWire’s crew saw the movie at a Seattle showing sponsored by the ACLU, so you can imagine that the audience scored Snowden high on the patriot scale.

After the movie, Shankar Narayan, director of ACLU of Washington’s Technology and Liberty Project, noted that Snowden’s revelations helped the national ACLU challenge the NSA over its surveillance programs. He also noted that the controversy continues.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Unusual suspects for ‘alien megastructure’ star

Image: Comets and star
This illustration shows a star behind a shattered comet. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

That mysterious “alien megastructure” star is still a mystery, but the most plausible explanations appear to be dense patches of interstellar gas or dust that just happened to pass in front of the star.

That’s the upshot of analyses conducted by the astronomer who first raised the idea of an extraterrestrial construction project a year ago.

In the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Penn State’s Jason Wright and a co-author, Steinn Sigurdsson, run through a wide range of hypotheses for the behavior of a star called KIC 8462852, also known as Boyajian’s Star or Tabby’s Star.

Not even the alien hypothesis is ignored.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Jeff Bezos donates Heinlein Prize, keeps sword

Dula, Bezos and Diamandis
Jeff Bezos (center) shows off a sword that serves as part of the Heinlein Prize, as XPRIZE co-founder Peter Diamandis (right) takes the selfie and Art Dula (left), trustee for the Heinlein Prize Trust, looks on. (Credit: Peter Diamandis via Twitter)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos received one of the spaceflight community’s richest honors, the Heinlein Prize, during a ceremony in the nation’s capital on Wednesday night. The prize includes a $250,000 cash award … and a sword that evokes one of Robert A. Heinlein’s sci-fi stories.

Bezos hung onto the sword, but he’s donating the $250,000 to an nonprofit group known as the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

The prize was handed out by representatives of the late science-fiction writer’s family trust to recognize Bezos’ work with Blue Origin, the space venture he founded. Past recipients include Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX; and Peter Diamandis, who co-founded the XPRIZE program as well as Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Gaia satellite charts a billion stars in Milky Way

Milky Way
This image shows stars in the Milky Way, plus neighboring galaxies. (Credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC)

The team behind the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has released its first catalog of more than a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, but that’s just the start.

Eventually, the readings from Gaia’s all-sky survey of celestial objects will be assembled into the most detailed 3-D map ever made of our home galaxy.

“Gaia is at the forefront of astrometry, charting the sky at precisions that have never been achieved before,” Alvaro Gimenez, ESA’s director of science, said in an announcement accompanying the Sept. 14 data release.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

DNA points to lots of marine life near cities

Image: Redondo Beach
Washington state’s Redondo Beach is one of the urbanized sites where environmental DNA samples were taken. (Credit: Joe Mabel via Flickr / CC BY-SA 3.0)

A novel method for analyzing the DNA left behind in the waters of Puget Sound shows that urban shorelines tend to harbor a wider array of marine life than less developed shorelines.

That outcome came as a surprise to the researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and Oregon State University. In a study published this week by the journal PeerJ, they reported that bivalves and gastropods – clams and snails – were particularly widespread.

“Clams and other things that live in mud seem to like living near cities, which is really interesting,” lead author Ryan Kelly, a UW assistant professor of marine and environmental affairs, said in a news release.

Get the full story on GeekWire.