Sunspot 1748 Makes it's Presence Known: Video

Sunspot 1748 had just begun its rotation to the Earthside of the Sun on April 5th and already has erupted twice. The first was a C2-class flare and a stronger M2-class flare occurred about 10 hours later. 

Credit: NASA / SDO /

SOFIA Airborne telescope: Makes its first observations - New Scientist

Airborne telescope makes its first observations - space - 28 May 2010 - New Scientist

SOFIA snapped this composite infrared image of Jupiter (right) during its first flight as a working observatory. The white stripe shows a region of relatively transparent clouds that reveal the planet's warm interior (Image: NASA)

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A jet with a large telescope built into its side has snapped its first in-flight images of the night sky. The flight begins a new phase for the infrared observatory, called SOFIA, which was once in danger of cancellation due to cost overruns.

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a Boeing 747 jet that has been modified to carry a 2.5-metre telescope provided by the German Space Agency. The observatory is designed to fly at an altitude of about 12 kilometres.

That altitude is above more than 99 per cent of the atmosphere's water vapour, which obscures the sky at infrared wavelengths. That means SOFIA will receive roughly 80 per cent of the infrared light that hits orbiting space telescopes. It can be used to study phenomena such as star and planet formation in the Milky Way.

The telescope took off on Wednesday from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, for its first in-flight night observations. Images taken during the six-hour flight are sharp enough for the telescope to perform "front-line astronomical research", SOFIA project scientist Pam Marcum said in a statement.

SOFIA, which cost more than $1 billion to develop, was nearly cancelled due to delays and cost overruns. NASA decided to restore funding to the project in 2006, after criticism from astronomers and a technical review that said the project faced no insurmountable challenges.

NASA aims to fly SOFIA several times a week for about 20 years.

Solar Impulse: Solar-powered plane makes airborne hop

The prototype of Solar Impulse, a pioneering Swiss bid to fly around the world on solar power, briefly took off for the first time on Thursday but under battery power, the organisers said.

The high tech single-seater with the wingspan of an Airbus A340 airliner (63.40 metres) made a controlled 400 metre (yard) flight about one metre above the runway at Duebendorf air base near the Swiss city of Zurich, said co-founders Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg.

"A plane like that never flown before and it's extraordinary... because it's an area of flight that has been unexplored until now," Borschberg, chief executive of Solar Impulse, told AFP.

"It was very important to see if it would rise and what way we could keep it stable," he added.

Despite its wingspan, the aircraft only weighs 1,600 kilogrammes, about as much as a medium-sized car.

Although the prototype is fitted up for solar-powered flight, the four electric motors were powered by batteries for the occasion.

The prototype, which is slightly smaller than the craft that is expected to fly around the world, is primarily aimed at testing the cutting edge technology used to build and control the aircraft, and to fly through the night.

A first non-stop 36 hour flight through darkness is planned in Switzerland from spring 2010, with the prospect of a five stage flight around the world in 2012.

Someone's Breath on Your Neck Makes you Hear Better

DEPENDING on whose it is, breath on your neck may or may not feel good. Either way, now it seems that it can help you understand what someone is saying. The discovery could lead to hearing aids that emit puffs of air.

We know that what we see affects what we hear. For example, if we hear "ba" while watching a person saying "ga" we think we've heard "da". Bryan Gick and colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, wondered whether tactile sensations affect hearing too.

In speech, the "aspirated" syllables "pa" and "ta" are accompanied by a puff of exhaled air, whereas "ba" and "da" are not. Such puffs aren't always detected when someone is speaking, but Gick's team reasoned that the brain might learn to use puffs to modify its perception of certain sounds.

They had 66 volunteers listen to a male voice saying all four syllables against background noise that made it hard to distinguish them. At the same time as some of the syllables, they delivered a puff of air to the hand or neck.

Although many volunteers could not consciously feel the puffs, they were still more successful at correctly identifying "pa" and "ta" when these sounds were accompanied by air puffs. In contrast, air puffs made it less likely that they would correctly identify "ba" and "da" and more likely that they would mistake these for sounds for "pa" and "ta" (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08572).

Google Earth: Live video makes cities bustle

Data from traffic and weather cameras can bring the ghost towns of virtual earth programmes to life with people, cars and weather....