Plankton in the Clouds 84
An anonymous reader writes "NASA is reporting that the September 1997 Pacific hurricane, Nora, was able to deliver sea salt and plankton as far inland as Oklahoma. The tale-tell signs of prismatic light halos around cirrus clouds pointed to ice crystals with nucleated hexagons and sea-salted clouds. Various proposals have been made previously about such 'life in the clouds' proposals on other planets like Jupiter and Venus."
Re:Moon rainbows (Score:4, Informative)
Google for sun halo [google.com] gives 155 000 hits compared to 91 000 for moon halo [google.com], so halos around the moon are apperently not entirely uncommon. On this page [nasa.gov] is a neat picture of a sun halo, and a short explanation of the phenomenon.
in other news (FISH) (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Moon rainbows (Score:5, Informative)
Some links:
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/970207e.html [nasa.gov]
http://www.geocities.com/~kcdreher/sundogs.html [geocities.com]
They may be pretty, but they'd be easier to appreciate if they didn't signify that it's freakin' cold outside :-/
Re:Is NASA really relevant?? (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely. Here's one shining example -- the so-called genesis rock, a piece of anorthosite which formed part of the moon's priomordial crust, was a critical piece in unlocking the moon's early history.
It was recoverd by the crew of Apollo 15, the first of the J-missions, where the objectives focused on science and not just seeing if the Apollo hardware worked (e.g. landing on 11, precision landing on 12).
This crew had been trained as pretty good field geologists by the legendary Lee Silver. Without their eye for geological context this rock would probably never have been spotted, and certainly not had it's recovery site as well characterised.
Even geologists who had been previously opposed to the manned missions to the moon acknowledged the value of their contribution, and those of Apollo 16 and 17.
To quote geologist Dale Jackson, who said at the time: "Did you see those guys today? They got up there on the side of that mountain and found that bolder and they sampled the soil around the rock, and then they knocked a piece off it, and then they rolled it over and got some of the soil underneath it! Why, they did everything but fuck that rock!"
If you think this material could have been recovered by, say, remotely controlled machine, well, I invite you to place the best robot and robot team you can find in the Arizona desert and match them up against a single geology grad student and search for, say, fossils, for a day.
A good book... (Score:3, Informative)
-Ben
Intelligent life in anywhere else? (Score:2, Informative)
Okie Stereotypes [216.239.39.100] "Yes, I'm from the Sooner State, I tell them -- land of wheat fields, Indian reservations, TV evangelists, and country music; and who could forget the setting of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma: 'O-o-o-oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain.'
A state shaped like a kitchen utensil, as if the founders who drew the boundary lines had consigned it to serve as a perpetual building block of the Southwest, an essential part of the meal that no one sees, all glamour and strength hidden from view, what remains on the stove after servers carry away entrees on fancy china plates and lace napkins -- a part of the United States that everyone knows instinctively, but which few can place on a map."
By the way, there are more than 700 National Merit/Achievement/Hispanic Scholars at the University of Oklahoma. How does your state university compare?