Hey there science fans! No cutesy framing device this week, because I am quit frankly not in the mood. I have a sinus headache right now and it has me feeling tense, restless, and grumpy.
I have taken a Reactine and some generic ibuprofen, and hopefully those two together, plus a little clearing of the escape routes, will do the trick and chase these pains away.
But for the moment, it feels like my entire skull is being squeezed on all sides by a fist made of stone. Makes me wish I could just push a button and my sinuses would just empty all at once.
Obviously, I would want to be over a sink when this happened.
Our first science story of the day is this rather fantastic idea : mining gold from plants.
Sounds like something out of Mother Goose, doesn’t it? Spinning straw into gold?
But the idea is not quite as straightforward as that. It goes more like this :
- Plant a fast-growing leafy plant like mustard or sunflowers in soil with gold in it, like the soil that used to have a tailings pool from a gold mine on top of it.
- After the plants are a goodly size, treat the soil with chemicals that make gold soluble in water. (Normally, it is not. )
- The plants will then suck the gold up and concentrate it in its roots.
- ??????
- Profit
As you can see, they are having a little trouble with the second last step there. Turns out, it is harder to get the gold out of the plants than you would think.
Still, if it works for gold, it will also work for a bunch of other, nastier stuff like mercury, arsenic, and copper, and thus the process could be used to decontaminate soil which has been rendered toxic by various mining processes.
The idea of getting the gold out, then, would be to be able to fund the decon efforts by selling the gold, and thus make it self-sustaining or at least highly efficient.
All that from mustard and sunflowers!
Anyone for some mustard-flavoured sunflower seeds?
Next up is the science of… DARK LIGHTNING!
Sounds a little like what The Emperor was using to kill Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi, doesn’t it? Or a Swedish dark metal band.
But no, it is just lightning that creates no visible light, hence, it is ‘dark’ in the same way that dark matter is dark.
The article is a little on the unclear side, but from what I gather, there is no electricity involved either. It is an entirely different kind of energetic discharge than traditional lightning (light lightning? That doesn’t sound right. ), but accomplishes the same thing, namely, reducing the difference in energy between the thundercloud and its surroundings.
It is far more rare than the usual sort of lightning, though, which is part of the reason why it has taken a long time to track it down and prove it exists.
So what’s it like to get struck by dark lightning? It immediately grants you vast dark power over the gateway between life and death.
OK, not really. It takes the form of x-rays and gamma rays, and so if you got “struck” by it just once, it would probably do nothing to you at all. They would mostly pass right through you and you would likely never even know it happened.
But if somehow you got struck many, many times (maybe you are standing next to a dark lightning rod), it would turn you into the Dark Hulk probably give you a bad case of radiation poisoning.
Fun fact : radiation poisoning is considered one of the most painful ways to die, period.
Last for today, we have this amazing story about NASA and their plans to capture an asteroid and park it somewhere and then explore it.
It’s early days just yet (they do not even have an asteroid picked out yet), but it seems like an awesome prospect : find an asteroid in the 500-1000 ton range that is going to pass pretty close by Earth, send a satellite to wrap it up in a flexible canopy, maneuver vehicle and asteroid into a nice convenient point in the Earth-Moon system (I hear the LaGrange points are very nice this time of the cosmic year), and then send astronauts up to explore said asteroid, nice and close to home.
This video will give you the basic idea.
First, the satellite unfurls the capture canopy. (Very cool topography there. ) Then, the laser lets the satellite get a precise fix on the asteroid. Then, the satellite eases up to the asteroid, engulfs it in the capture canopy, and closes around it fully, like the neck of a drawstring bag when you pull the string. Then the satellite uses its maneuvering jets to get to position for primary thrusters to do a burn and take the asteroid to its final position.
Then, astronauts can just go visit it, take samples and drop them down to Earth, explore the asteroid and learn more about how they are made, and maybe even learn some things about what it would take to intercept and “nudge” an Earth-bound killer asteroid into becoming another near miss.
It could even lead to the first serious attempt at space mining. Even a relatively small nickel-iron asteroid represents an enormous quantity of metals and minerals. It might very well make economic sense to send miners up there to recover all these goodies, especially if there is our old friend gold up there, or similarly precious metals like platinum, rare earth minerals, and so on.
But at the very least, we humans will have reached out our hands to catch a (potential) falling star, put it in our (gravitational) pocket, and added a new (tiny) moon to our planet.
And that is no small achievement, is it Perry?
No, it is definitely not. (He was so much more fun than Bing Crosby, don’t you think?)
Seeya next week folks!