Alan Irwin's Blog » science

Pictures of Assembling the Space Shuttle

alanirwin — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:50:43 +0000

I found this site where someone has posted a series of pictures documenting the steps of assembling a space shuttle. They’re pretty interesting.

Teenager Achieves Nuclear Fusion at Home

alanirwin — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 22:09:34 +0000

Okay, what’s up with teens nowadays? Hot on the heels of the home spectrograph, I now find that another teen has been able to achieve nuclear fusion at his home. Using spare parts he bought from eBay, from hardware stores, and from just scrounging around he built his aparatus in his basement and actually achieved nuclear fusion. Nothing dangerous or commercially valuable, but quite an achievement.

Good lord, I was a smart kid but I was happy to read and tinker with some electronics. What are Jory and Monica going to come up with? And is Artemis going to transform time and space?

Teenager Builds Inexpensive Spectrograph

alanirwin — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:21:08 +0000

This is just a cool story. Mary Masterman is 17 years old and wins the Intel Science Talent Search for building an inexpensive spectrograph, which is a fairly sophisticated piece of equipment. For beating out 1700 other high school seniors in the 66th annual event, she wins a $100,000 scholarship. The design is pretty cool, and you can read more at cnn.com.

Eruption on IO

alanirwin — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:18:27 +0000

Here’s an image I came across that’s pretty amazing. The New Horizons spacecraft is on its way to Pluto, but recently used Jupiter for a gravity assist along its way. While passing by, it got this amazing photo of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Io is one of the most active places in the solar system, geologically speaking. This picture was taken March 1, 2007, and shows the plume of a volcano that’s approximately 200 miles (330 kilometers) high. Just amazing. You can read more at the New Horizons website.