Friday, May 3, 2013

A Relatively Quiet Summer. Space and Science News. The Imaginarium

Mr. Williamson

Starting his new job next school year.

(This picture pretty much sums up how I'll feel :)

Hello Troops,

I've got three more Fridays to go before I hang up my whistle and microphone at the Space Center and move on to create Farpoint at Renaissance Academy. You have the same amount of time left in your school year. Ahead of us lies the quietest Space Center summer we've had in 23 years. The Space Center will reopen for private missions, but camps are questionable; the decision is still pending several factors. Discovery Space Center will run private missions and camps, but not as many as the Space Center use to run over the last two plus decades. This reduced schedule will give Space Center staff and volunteers a slow summer with more free time on their hands. What will we do with ourselves?

I may take a vacation. Hang on...... why take one? I may take two, or three vacations. In addition to a bit of traveling, I'll be busy working with our outstanding staff and volunteers on creating the first long duration missions for the Farpoint Cadets. We also have a few Simlabs to create. I'll need to spend some time brushing up on the 6th grade language arts curriculum. I'll be teaching language arts and math at Renaissance. I'm OK with the math - that's what I've been teaching for 30 years. Language arts is another matter. The last time I taught 6th grade language arts was the 1989-1990 school year. We still used basal readers in those days!

I think I'll have plenty to keep me busy this summer. I'll need lots of help. I know I can count on our Space Center family and friends for that.

Discovery Space Center is running an overnight mission tonight. I'll be there at 11:00 P.M. to chaperon. After that, the weekend is mine. Let's remember to send many positive vibes Casey Voeks' way. He is running for Utah County Chairman of the Republican Party. He speaks at the county convention tomorrow at 9:00 A.M. The election is held afterwords. Casey is a long time Space Center volunteer and employee. He is the director of the Discovery Space Center in Pleasant Grove.

One final shout out before we move on to Space and Science News and the Imaginarium directed towards our fantastic Farpoint Cadets! I met with several of them briefly last night. We discussed volunteering at the Space Center and Discovery Space Center. We talked about the still developing Farpoint Department program. They each got a T-shirt and a tour of the Discovery's simulators.
It will be a pleasure working with such fine students.

Mr. Williamson

Space and Science News

Why Humans Will Survive the Next World Ending Catastrophe

There's growing evidence that Earth may be headed for a mass extinction, where over 75 percent of all species die out and the world is changed forever. There's also evidence that humans would survive such an event — for better or for worse........

Whether you believe we deserve to or not, Homo sapiens will be around for many more millennia. So we'd better start planning now how to make that survival as good and healthy as possible. Of course there are always going to be disasters we can't plan for, no matter how nice we are: A supernova could fry off a chunk of our atmosphere, or a pandemic could drop our population down to a few million. But if we don't prepare ourselves for these and other eventualities, our survival could be a pretty ugly thing that nobody deserves.

Will we be scrabbling out an existence in the ruins, or building robust cities and exploring the spaces beyond our planet's puny envelope of atmosphere? That's up to us, right now. Read More

NASA releases a fantastic new photo of Enceladus

NASA's Cassini mission has posted a new photo of Saturn's moon Enceladus emitting a stunning plume of water vapor longer than the moon is wide.

IBM creates world's smallest (and cutest) movie using atoms

You're about to see the movie that holds the Guinness World Records™ record for the World's Smallest Stop-Motion Film (see how it was made at http://youtu.be/xA4QWwaweWA). The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM's research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. A movie made with atoms.

The Imaginarium
Take a moment and see how ordinary humans, like yourself, made the ordinary - extraordinary.

Things people do that make me gulp and shudder