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Rocket Pen Titan – $8.95
It’s a rocket! It’s a pen! No it’s Rocket Pen Titan from the NeatoShop!
Rocket Pen Titan is there for you when you need a break from overwhelming paperwork. Bad work day be gone! It is time to count down and blast off to your fun zone.
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The disappearance of hydrogen near the surface of Saturn’s moon, Titan, could be evidence of hydrogen breathing lifeforms.
There’s some exciting—and potentially confusing—news coming out of the NASA’s Cassini Saturn orbiter program. Two new papers have come out, both dealing with the possibility that alien life could be theoretically hanging out on Saturn’s moon Titan.
Link via BoingBoing
Around boiling undersea hydrothermal vents? Inside a nuclear reactor? Under an arctic rock? Those harsh living conditions may not seem compatible to life to you and me, but extremophiles love ‘em.
Scientists have discovered yet another unlikely place where you can find (microbial) life: a hot asphalt lake.
Pitch Lake is a poisonous, foul smelling, hell hole on the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago. The lake is filled with hot asphalt and bubbling with noxious hydrocarbon gases and carbon dioxide. Water is scarce here and certainly below the levels normally thought of as a threshold for life.
These alien conditions have made Pitch Lake a place of more than passing interest to astrobiologists. Various scientists have suggested that it is the closest thing on Earth to the kind of hydrocarbon lakes that we can see on Saturn’s moon Titan. Naturally, these scientists would very much like to answer the question of what kind of life these places can support.
Today, Dirk Schulze-Makuch from Washington State University and a few buddies provide an answer. Pitch lake, they say, is teaming (sic) with microbial life. They say that, on average, each gram of goo in the lake contains some 10^7 living cells.
Never underestimate Mother Nature, guys: Link
The picture above was taken by NASA’s Cassini space probe of Titan, a moon of Saturn. The glint of light at the top of the moon is of a lake — the first non-Earth lake ever seen. In Popular Science, Jeremy Hsu writes:
A haze of methane enshrouds Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and prevents scientists from seeing most sunlight reflections off the surface. But NASA’s Cassini orbiter managed to snap a stunning image of sunlight glinting off a huge, liquid methane lake — a smoking gun that confirms liquid in the northern hemisphere.
Titan remains the only other planetary body besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, and appears eerily similar to our world as far as rain and other weather patterns. But instead of liquid water, methane and ethane drizzle down from Titan’s atmosphere and fill the many lakes dotting the moon.
The newly revealed visual and infrared image was taken back on July 8, just as the sun had begun to directly shine upon the northern lakes near the start of spring on Titan. Scientists matched the reflection to the southern shoreline of Kraken Mare, a lake that covers almost 150,000 square miles and sits in the northern hemisphere.
Link | Photo: NASA
