The media just about wet itself over the reports that a “Second Earth” had been discovered orbiting around a distant star called Gliese 581. The frenzy got even a little more carried away when one less-than-prudent astrophysicist asserted that he was 100% sure that there was life on Gliese 581g, based on absolutely ZERO evidence (which, I’ll give you, is usually enough for most Republicans anyway). Several weeks later, though, different data from a different team seemed to directly contradict that announcement, and it will take a couple of years to try to determine if there is really a planet there at all, or if Vogt’s team were simply trying to score some media attention ahead of a rival group.

Only a few weeks later, the same sort of thing was repeated when NASA staged a big press event, complete with mysterious pre-announcement about something big-BIG-BIG!!! that had a lot of people openly speculating that extraterrestrial life had been discovered or that an asteroid was about to kill us all, or that somebody caught Miley Cyrus smoking drugs or something. The big announcement wasn’t THAT big, but it was still a pretty interesting bit of news: a team of microbiologists announced that they had “discovered” a strain of bacteria that incorporated arsenic into their DNA. The inference was that this would have to change the way scientists defined “life” as they searched for it on other planets. This “breakthrough” didn’t even last long enough for the news cycle to forget about it, though. P.Z. Myers was all over it the very next day, as were a lot of other people, and now the lead researcher has been making mea culpas in public for letting the hype sell the story.

You probably also heard the breathless report about the man cured of AIDS via stem cell replacement therapy. This wasn’t even a new story, having been first reported as long ago as 2008, so it’s not clear to me why this suddenly got swept into the hype machine unless some lazy-ass reporter surfing Google found it and ran with it. Still, “A Cure For AIDS” is a helluva headline, and so there it went. This follow-up post at BoingBoing, though, includes the missing “rest of the story”: the “cure” was a complete one-off due to a combination of the patient’s own immune system having been destroyed by chemo/radiation treatment for leukemia, and the DNA of the bone marrow donor having a known genetic mutation that resists HIV.

Science is pretty damned amazing, but science reporting sure as hell isn’t.

Opening Tycho Brahe's tin coffin

This week, scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark exhumed the remains of Renaissance-era astronomer Tycho Brahe to see if they could find any new evidence to explain the cause of his death, which some believe was due to suspicious causes. Brahe was legendary in his time as much for his exploits as for his science: he wore a silver prosthetic nose after his own was cut off in a duel, and he owned a pet moose which entertained guests at his castle.

The remains of Brahe's skull still have hairs from his mustache attached

Brahe is most noted in astronomy for his accurate calculations of planetary orbits made without the benefit of telescope; his apprentice, Johannes Kepler, would become the astronomer who proved the theory of heliocentrism — that the planets, including Earth, revolve around the sun. It is not the first time Brahe’s remains have been disinterred: they were exhumed in 1901 for similar examination.

A note left by the 1901 team that last examined Brahe's remains

Sometimes the remains of famous figures are exhumed for less noble reasons. EnglishRussia.com had a post the other day about the rather inglorious relocation of Joseph Stalin’s remains in 1961. When Stalin died in 1953, his body was embalmed in the same way as V.I. Lenin’s and placed in permanent display alongside Lenin’s in Red Square.

Stalin's burial in Lenin's tomb

By the early 1960s, however, Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalin had become SOP for the Soviets, and Stalin’s body was removed from the tomb and reburied in a simple grave outside the Kremlin walls.

A simple slab is the marker for Stalin's second grave

Didja see that big wave swoop over the surface of the sun in that clip? That was a coronal mass ejection on the surface of the sun that happened on Sunday, and the resulting solar wave of electromagnetic particles and such is hitting Earth even as we speak.

The solar eruption was unusually large, and the resulting wave is particularly strong. Astronomers say that here on Earth we should expect to see increased visible aurora activity, making the Aurora Borealis visible much farther south than usual. The media, however, have latched on to the buzzwords “solar tsunami” to tart up their headlines, and the London Telegraph breathlessly reports that the “tsunami” could “destroy satellites and wreck power and communications grids around the globe…”

Mm-hmm.

The CBC reports that scientists using the new Spitzer Space Telescope (you know, the one that is capable of nailing three hookers a day) have discovered naturally-occurring fullerenes in the dust of planetary nebulae. They theorize that the buckyballs may be responsible for light absorption in space, and that the particles may be very common in space, whereas here on Earth fullerenes are the product of laboratories.

At the opposite end of things, researchers at UMass Amherst are working on building a microscope that should be able to resolve an image of an individual molecule. The researchers are trying to develop a better understanding of how a protein called tubulin controls cell division, and they expect that their microscope will let them watch real-time reactions of tubulin down to its molecular level.

If you live in North America, I hope you took a moment to look up at the night sky yesterday evening, especially just as darkness was settling in.

The planet Venus and the planet Jupiter were in “convergence” with the Moon, making this exceptionally bright “sad face” display. Here in Massachuestts, the sky was perfectly clear from dusk until about 9:00 p.m. and it was very impressive to see.

(I didn’t take this picture, BTW. It comes from a Mutual Friend of Torrez.)

If you live in Australia or other regions in the Southern Hemisphere, you would have seen a “happy face” instead, due to the change in angle between the Earth and Moon on the opposite side of the globe.

If you did miss seeing it, it’s not entirely too late. The Moon will be much farther away from the two planets than it was last night, but since these three objects are the first ones to show up in the night sky, you should still be able to make it out. Once the Moon has moved further across the sky, Venus and Jupiter will continue to be exceptionally bright and close to one another for a couple more days.

AAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!!!!! We’re all gonna die!!!!!

The planet Mercury is going to smash into Earth and kill us all!! It’s hopeless!! We’re DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!!!!

Well, someday. Maybe. If the gravitational field of Jupiter is just right. You know, in theory anyway.

Via Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, comes news that yesterday there was a massive gamma ray burst bigger than any astronomical event ever seen by human beings. The event was so massive that it was visible to the unaided human eye, even though the burst was 7.5 billion light years away. For those of you who aren’t fundamentalist Christians, that means that the explosion actually took place 7.5 billion YEARS ago, before the Earth was even formed. (For those of you who are fundamentalist Christians, GFY) Ordinarily, the most distant object visible to the naked eye is a galaxy 2.9 billion light years away.

The afterglow of the burst (which is what you see in the picture above), was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever detected in recorded history. If you had been standing outside in the dark, in a place without much light pollution, this burst would have been just barely visible if you knew where to look. Most astronomers were able to pick it up on radio telescopes, not optical ones.

To give you a sense of how massive that explosion would have been, Phil Plait says:

Let me put this in perspective for you. Imagine a one megaton nuclear weapon detonating. That’s roughly 50 times the explosive yield of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Devastating.

The Sun, every second of every day of every year, gives off 100 billion times this much energy. That’s every second. A star is a terrifying object.

In the few seconds that a gamma-ray burst lasts, it packs a million million million times that much energy into its beams. In other words, for those few ticks of a clock the GRB is sending out more energy than the Sun will in its entire lifetime.

Wow. Just wow.

Meanwhile, if you were all keyed up about the satellite shoot-down that was also supposed to happen around 10:30 this evening, you’ll probably have to content yourself with just the eclipse. An updated announcement from the Navy this morning said that bad weather will probably scrub any chance of firing the missile this evening. This CNN story has more details; for example, the launch window for actually hitting the missile only lasts for 10 seconds, and the missile has to hit the fuel tank of the satellite dead-on for it to accomplish the stated objective of the mission, which was to prevent the toxic fuel from reaching the ground. The satellite itself generates no heat, so the missile’s heat-seeking capabilities can’t be used to target the missile, making the likelihood of an accurate hit all the less likely. And the price tag for all of this: a cool $60 million.

If you’re outside braving the cold to see the lunar eclipse, you might be able to see the satellite, according to this Sky & Telescope article. The explosion, when and if it occurs, will probably only be visible in the immediate range of the missile launch, somewhere out in the North Pacific.