Blue moon

Two full moons in one month happens about once every 30 months - the second full moon is called a "blue moon" - hence the expression, "once in a blue moon." The blue moon happens tonight.  It's not actually blue - this photo was created with filters.  

Mankind reaches the edge of the solar system

Humanity escapes the solar system: 

Voyager 1 signals that it has reached the edge of interstellar space - 11billion miles away

By EDDIE WRENN

UK Daily Mail

With absolutely no attempt at hyperbole, it's fair to say that this is one of - if not the - biggest achievement of the human race.

For, as we speak, an object conceived in the human mind, and built by our tools, and launched from our planet, is sailing out of the further depths of our solar system - and will be the first object made by man (sic) to sail out into interstellar space.

The Voyager 1, built by Nasa and launched in 1977 has spent the last 35 years steadily increasing its distance from Earth, and is now 11,100,000,000 miles away.

Indications over the last week suggest that Voyager 1 is now leaving the heliosphere - the last vestige of this solar system.

 . . . Voyager 1 - which is still managing to communicate with Earth with radio waves that reach us 16 hours later - is beginning to experience a bit of heat.

It is detecting more energetic particles around it, implying it it at the very edge of the heliosheath, which is like a bubble around the solar system, protecting us from the cosmic winds of deep space.

The Voyager entered the heliosphere in 2004.  According to The Atlantic, certain cosmic rays have a hard time entering the heliosphere, but as of last month, the sum of these slower particles increased by about 10 per cent.

This does not necessarily mean we have crossed over - but it means we are getting close.

Genetic benefit of gay genes

Fascinating new research on male homosexuality.  I found myself thinking and talking about this for days after I read it~

Gay Men Have Evolutionary Benefit For Their Families, New Research Suggests

By: Natalie Wolchover on Huffington Post

While female sexuality appears to be more fluid, research suggests that male gayness is an inborn, unalterable, strongly genetically influenced trait. But considering that the trait discourages the type of sex that leads to procreation — that is, sex with women — and would therefore seem to thwart its own chances of being genetically passed on to the next generation, why are there gay men at all?

This longstanding question is finally being answered by new and ongoing research. For several years, studies led by Andrea Camperio Ciani at the University of Padova in Italy and others have found that mothers and maternal aunts of gay men tend to have significantly more offspring than the maternal relatives of straight men. The results show strong support for the "balancing selection hypothesis," which is fast becoming the accepted theory of the genetic basis of male homosexuality.

The theory holds that the same genetic factors that induce gayness in males also promote fecundity (high reproductive success) in those males' female maternal relatives. Through this trade-off, the maternal relatives' "gay man genes," though they aren't expressed as such, tend to get passed to future generations in spite of their tendency to make their male inheritors gay.

While no one knows which genes, exactly, these might be, at least one of them appears to be located on the X chromosome, according to genetic modeling by Camperio Ciani and his colleagues. Males inherit only one X chromosome — the one from their mother — and if it includes the gene that promotes gayness in males and fecundity in females, he is likely to be gay while his mom and her female relatives are likely to have lots of kids. If a daughter inherits that same X-linked gene, she herself may not be gay, but she can pass it on to her sons.

. . . "High fecundity, that means having more babies, is not about pleasure in sex, nor is it about promiscuity. The androphilic pattern that we found is about females who increase their reproductive value to attract the best males," Camperio Ciani told Life's Little Mysteries.

Turns out, the moms and aunts of gay men have an advantage over the moms and aunts of straight men for several reasons: They are more fertile, displaying fewer gynecological disorders or complications during pregnancy; they are more extroverted, as well as funnier, happier and more relaxed; and they have fewer family problems and social anxieties. "In other words, compared to the others, [they are] perfect for a male," Camperio Ciani said. Attracting and choosing from the best males enables these women to produce more offspring, he noted.

The new study will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

Handedness still a mystery

NPR had this fun story - hand preference is yet another human mystery that we haven't solved yet!  Here's my favorite paragraph:

While science was quick to condemn left-handers — though those theories are now discredited — it has been less quick to come up with an explanation for the phenomenon. Smits says hand preference isn't inherited the way other traits like eye and hair color are, and no one's really sure why it arose in the first place. 

More exciting space news

Earth-like planet discovered in neighboring solar system! (I mentioned, not by name, the announcement regarding Kepler 21b in an entry on September 29, 2010.)

It may have a radius about 2.4 times that of our home planet, but NASA scientists have confirmed that Kepler-22b is the first planet we've ever confirmed orbits within the so-called "habitable zone" of a Sun-like star, making it the most Earth-like planet we've yet discovered.

In astronomy, the habitable zone (also known as the "Goldilocks zone") is the region surrounding a star in which an orbiting planet could maintain liquid water (and, by extension,life) on its surface. And as the "Goldilocks" moniker implies, whether or not a planet resides inside a habitable zone has everything to do with whether the planet is a little too cold, a little too hot, or just right, temperature-wise.

Take Kepler-21b, for example, whose discovery was announced last week by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. Kepler-21b is even closer to the size of Earth than Kepler-22b, but it orbits far too close to its sun to sustain any form of life we're familiar with; surface temperatures on the planet are estimated to reach as much as 3000-degrees Fahrenheit — that's hot enough to melt iron, not to mention any hope of us ever calling K-21b "Earth 2.0."

But Kepler-22b is a different story. Sure, the planet orbits about 15% closer to its star than Earth does to the Sun, but its star is also significantly cooler, dimmer, and smaller than ours. And while scientists have yet to determine K-22b's composition — be it rocky, gaseous or liquid — they estimate that surface temperatures on K-22b average a very Earth-like 72-degrees Fahrenheit.

NASA's Kepler mission (which is charged with identifying Earth-like planets throughout the Milky Way galaxy) has certainly turned up habitable zone planet candidates in the past, but Kepler 22-b is the first of these candidates to be officially confirmed.

And it certainly won't be the last. In fact, the confirmation was made on top of another announcement: that the Kepler mission has now discovered 1,094 additional potential planets (many of which could very well be Earth-like), bringing the total number of planet candidates discovered to date to 2,326.

Let's pause and consider that number for a moment. The Kepler space telescope has been in operation for less than three years, and already its findings stand to quadruplethe number of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system. If the rate of discovery continues on its present course, the identification of more and more Earth-like planets stands to ramp up in a big way.

"The tremendous growth in the number of Earth-size candidates tells us that we're honing in on the planets Kepler was designed to detect: those that are not only Earth-size, but also are potentially habitable," explains Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University. "The more data we collect, the keener our eye for finding the smallest planets out at longer orbital periods. We are really zeroing in on the true Earth-sized habitable planets."

In other words, we're getting closer and closer to finding Earth's twin — and that's assuming we haven't found something incredibly close already. All that's left now is coming up with a way to make the 600-light-year trip to Kepler-22b and we can set up camp.