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"disqusTitle": "Stealth Comet Blows Cover",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/comet_holmes.jpg\" width=\"300\">\u003cem> Comet Holmes, photographed on October 24, 2007, shortly after its\u003cbr>\nunexpected outburst.\u003cbr>\nCredit: Conrad Jung\u003c/em>\u003c/span>At the risk of sounding a news flash that will be past history by the time it hits the web, I can't let the sudden and unexpectedly bold appearance of normally mild-mannered and unassuming \u003ca href=\"http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/10775326.html\" target=\"_blank\">Comet Holmes\u003c/a> pass without comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>British astronomer, Edwin Holmes, discovered Comet Holmes in 1892. The comet orbits the Sun once about every seven years, bopping between the endpoints of its elliptical orbit from a point a bit beyond Mars' orbit (at its closest distance to the Sun) all the way out to the distance of Jupiter's orbit. Ordinarily, this comet doesn't become an unaided-eye apparition, usually cruising by well below the necessary brightness for this type of visibility. In fact, it's usually not easily visible in telescopes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, on October 24th something happened that surprised us all: Comet Holmes experienced an \"\u003ca href=\"http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/media/deepimpact-062805.html\" target=\"_blank\">outburst\u003c/a>,\" suddenly exuding gas that expanded to form a bubble-like cloud around the comet nucleus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bubble -- called the \"coma\" -- is much larger than the icy nucleus; in fact, a typical comet coma fills a volume of space greater than a planet, even if the nucleus itself is a modest object only tens of miles across. Most likely induced by the comet's closest passage to the Sun last May, and all the solar heating of its ices that passage entails, the outburst was so quick and so pronounced that the comet went from an extremely faint 18th \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude\" target=\"_blank\">magnitude\u003c/a> object to about a million times brighter, becoming easily visible to the unaided eye.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is why I've dubbed Holmes the \"Popcorn Comet.\" One moment it was a small, dark, dense kernel of ice and gravel, speeding along it's path farther and farther away from the Sun, the next moment (literally hours later), POP!, it was surrounded by a cloud many times its size and suddenly reflecting a million times more sunlight. By October 27th, the shell of the coma had expanded to a size quite a bit larger than the planet \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org/vsc/observatory/nellie/astrophotos/captions/comet_holmes.asp\" target=\"_blank\">Jupiter\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I've had a number of calls and emails asking about this comet. One person, in fact, emailed from San Lorenzo asking what this fuzzy thing was that he could see in the northeastern sky. \"It looked like a small moon,\" he commented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the moment (November 6th) the comet is still visible, appearing as a slightly fuzzy \"star\" in the constellation \u003ca href=\"http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/constellations/perseus.html\" target=\"_blank\">Perseus\u003c/a>, which is somewhat high in the northeast sky during the evening hours. For a time, Comet Holmes was the third brightest object in Perseus, but has since tapered a bit. It's difficult to say how long it will remain visible, as comets are notoriously unpredictable in their appearances and disappearances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For myself, it was a real treat, as unaided-eye comets are fairly rare -- and though Holmes, making its way around the Sun every 7 years, isn't like a \u003ca href=\"http://science.nasa.gov/NEWHOME/headlines/ast20oct98_1.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Haley\u003c/a> that only passes by once (or, if you're lucky, twice) in a lifetime, Holmes also doesn't normally put in an appearance. So, while I have a chance of seeing Haley once more, when I'm an old blogger, I may never see Holmes again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was delighted to wake up my daughter at 10:30 PM so that she could get a glimpse of Holmes through my spotting scope. Now, she can take the memory with her through her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cbr clear=\"all\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"geo\"> latitude: \u003cspan class=\"latitude\">37.8148\u003c/span>, longitude: \u003cspan class=\"longitude\">-122.178\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/comet_holmes.jpg\" width=\"300\">\u003cem> Comet Holmes, photographed on October 24, 2007, shortly after its\u003cbr>\nunexpected outburst.\u003cbr>\nCredit: Conrad Jung\u003c/em>\u003c/span>At the risk of sounding a news flash that will be past history by the time it hits the web, I can't let the sudden and unexpectedly bold appearance of normally mild-mannered and unassuming \u003ca href=\"http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/home/10775326.html\" target=\"_blank\">Comet Holmes\u003c/a> pass without comment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>British astronomer, Edwin Holmes, discovered Comet Holmes in 1892. The comet orbits the Sun once about every seven years, bopping between the endpoints of its elliptical orbit from a point a bit beyond Mars' orbit (at its closest distance to the Sun) all the way out to the distance of Jupiter's orbit. Ordinarily, this comet doesn't become an unaided-eye apparition, usually cruising by well below the necessary brightness for this type of visibility. In fact, it's usually not easily visible in telescopes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, on October 24th something happened that surprised us all: Comet Holmes experienced an \"\u003ca href=\"http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/media/deepimpact-062805.html\" target=\"_blank\">outburst\u003c/a>,\" suddenly exuding gas that expanded to form a bubble-like cloud around the comet nucleus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bubble -- called the \"coma\" -- is much larger than the icy nucleus; in fact, a typical comet coma fills a volume of space greater than a planet, even if the nucleus itself is a modest object only tens of miles across. Most likely induced by the comet's closest passage to the Sun last May, and all the solar heating of its ices that passage entails, the outburst was so quick and so pronounced that the comet went from an extremely faint 18th \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude\" target=\"_blank\">magnitude\u003c/a> object to about a million times brighter, becoming easily visible to the unaided eye.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is why I've dubbed Holmes the \"Popcorn Comet.\" One moment it was a small, dark, dense kernel of ice and gravel, speeding along it's path farther and farther away from the Sun, the next moment (literally hours later), POP!, it was surrounded by a cloud many times its size and suddenly reflecting a million times more sunlight. By October 27th, the shell of the coma had expanded to a size quite a bit larger than the planet \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org/vsc/observatory/nellie/astrophotos/captions/comet_holmes.asp\" target=\"_blank\">Jupiter\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I've had a number of calls and emails asking about this comet. One person, in fact, emailed from San Lorenzo asking what this fuzzy thing was that he could see in the northeastern sky. \"It looked like a small moon,\" he commented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the moment (November 6th) the comet is still visible, appearing as a slightly fuzzy \"star\" in the constellation \u003ca href=\"http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/constellations/perseus.html\" target=\"_blank\">Perseus\u003c/a>, which is somewhat high in the northeast sky during the evening hours. For a time, Comet Holmes was the third brightest object in Perseus, but has since tapered a bit. It's difficult to say how long it will remain visible, as comets are notoriously unpredictable in their appearances and disappearances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For myself, it was a real treat, as unaided-eye comets are fairly rare -- and though Holmes, making its way around the Sun every 7 years, isn't like a \u003ca href=\"http://science.nasa.gov/NEWHOME/headlines/ast20oct98_1.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Haley\u003c/a> that only passes by once (or, if you're lucky, twice) in a lifetime, Holmes also doesn't normally put in an appearance. So, while I have a chance of seeing Haley once more, when I'm an old blogger, I may never see Holmes again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was delighted to wake up my daughter at 10:30 PM so that she could get a glimpse of Holmes through my spotting scope. Now, she can take the memory with her through her life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cbr clear=\"all\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"geo\"> latitude: \u003cspan class=\"latitude\">37.8148\u003c/span>, longitude: \u003cspan class=\"longitude\">-122.178\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_allen.jpg\">\u003cem>A few telescopes from the Allen Telescope Array\u003c/em>\u003c/span>If you're at all like me, you spend a lot of time surfing the web pages of the astronomy departments in this country. Just the other day I was looking at the departments at \u003ca href=\"http://www.yale.edu/ycaa/\">Yale University\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.astro.lsa.umich.edu/\">University of Michigan\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.astro.wisc.edu/\">University of Wisconsin\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~astrogroup/\">UC-Santa Barbara \u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://casswww.ucsd.edu/\">UC-San Diego\u003c/a>. Each of these places has a share in their own world-class instrument. Yale and Wisconsin have shares in optical telescopes on \u003ca href=\"http://www.noao.edu/kpno/\">Kitt Peak\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.ociw.edu/Magellan/\">Michigan\u003c/a> has a share in a large optical telescope in Chile, and the University of California departments all have a share of the Keck Observatory \u003ca href=\"http://www.ociw.edu/Magellan/\">Keck Observatory\u003c/a> in Hawai'i.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is very common that a university shares time with other members of a consortium. The advantage of such an arrangement is that a department is guaranteed a certain number of nights to observe every year without having to foot the entire cost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Being attached to UC-Berkeley for more than eight years, I am very familiar with their instruments. The three major observatories for the \u003ca href=\"http://astro.berkeley.edu/\">UC-Berkeley astronomy department\u003c/a> are the \u003ca href=\"http://www.seti.org/seti/projects/ata/\">Allen Telescope Array\u003c/a>, the Keck Observatory, and the Combined Array for Reasearch in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy, or in our usual acronym vernacular \u003ca href=\"http://www.mmarray.org/\">CARMA\u003c/a>. With these observatories, the Berkeley astronomers can probe three entirely different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Allen Telescope Array is designed for cm-wave observations from Hat Creek, CA, where I did most of my graduate thesis work. It wasn't actually there at the time, I was using a different instrument that has since been moved to Owens Valley to join the CARMA array. The Allen Telescope is funded in part by a not-so-anonymous founder of Microsoft. His interest is in using the instrument to look for broadcast from nearby aliens. What's fascinating about the design of these telescopes is that they can actually observe multiple targets at once. While looking for aliens around one star, the instrument can simultaneously \u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/pulsars.html\">point at another nearby region of the sky and study pulsars\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/pulsars.html\">\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/objects/agn/agntext.html\">active galactic nuclei\u003c/a>, or anything else your heart desires. It's a great way to hedge your bets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"right\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_carma.jpg\">\u003cem>Several of the 15 CARMA antennas.\u003cbr>\nCredit: Andrew A. West, U.C. Berkeley,\u003cbr>\nRadio Astronomy Lab.\u003c/em>\u003c/span>Moving up in the electromagnetic spectrum, the CARMA array is the union of a (\u003ca href=\"http://www.ovro.caltech.edu/\">CalTech\u003c/a> instrument and a \u003ca href=\"http://bima.astro.umd.edu/\">Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland\u003c/a> instrument that is now in the mountains above Owens Valley. These telescopes are designed for observations in mm-wave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. There are quite a few molecular emission lines that can be observed at these wavelengths. These lines trace out the distribution of carbon monoxide and other compounds that are associated with star births. Among other projects, astronomers use these telescopes to map out regions of the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies that are forming huge new systems of stars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I've talked quite a bit in the past about the Keck Telescope, I'll leave it as a assignment for the reader to go back through some old posts for the science you can do with one of the largest optical telescopes in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cem>\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_kdawson.jpg\">\u003c/em>\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Kyle S. Dawson\u003c/strong> is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://www.lbl.gov/\" target=\"_blank\">Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cbr clear=\"all\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"geo\"> latitude: \u003cspan class=\"latitude\">40.8174\u003c/span>, longitude: \u003cspan class=\"longitude\">-121.47\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_allen.jpg\">\u003cem>A few telescopes from the Allen Telescope Array\u003c/em>\u003c/span>If you're at all like me, you spend a lot of time surfing the web pages of the astronomy departments in this country. Just the other day I was looking at the departments at \u003ca href=\"http://www.yale.edu/ycaa/\">Yale University\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.astro.lsa.umich.edu/\">University of Michigan\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.astro.wisc.edu/\">University of Wisconsin\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~astrogroup/\">UC-Santa Barbara \u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://casswww.ucsd.edu/\">UC-San Diego\u003c/a>. Each of these places has a share in their own world-class instrument. Yale and Wisconsin have shares in optical telescopes on \u003ca href=\"http://www.noao.edu/kpno/\">Kitt Peak\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.ociw.edu/Magellan/\">Michigan\u003c/a> has a share in a large optical telescope in Chile, and the University of California departments all have a share of the Keck Observatory \u003ca href=\"http://www.ociw.edu/Magellan/\">Keck Observatory\u003c/a> in Hawai'i.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It is very common that a university shares time with other members of a consortium. The advantage of such an arrangement is that a department is guaranteed a certain number of nights to observe every year without having to foot the entire cost.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Being attached to UC-Berkeley for more than eight years, I am very familiar with their instruments. The three major observatories for the \u003ca href=\"http://astro.berkeley.edu/\">UC-Berkeley astronomy department\u003c/a> are the \u003ca href=\"http://www.seti.org/seti/projects/ata/\">Allen Telescope Array\u003c/a>, the Keck Observatory, and the Combined Array for Reasearch in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy, or in our usual acronym vernacular \u003ca href=\"http://www.mmarray.org/\">CARMA\u003c/a>. With these observatories, the Berkeley astronomers can probe three entirely different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Allen Telescope Array is designed for cm-wave observations from Hat Creek, CA, where I did most of my graduate thesis work. It wasn't actually there at the time, I was using a different instrument that has since been moved to Owens Valley to join the CARMA array. The Allen Telescope is funded in part by a not-so-anonymous founder of Microsoft. His interest is in using the instrument to look for broadcast from nearby aliens. What's fascinating about the design of these telescopes is that they can actually observe multiple targets at once. While looking for aliens around one star, the instrument can simultaneously \u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/pulsars.html\">point at another nearby region of the sky and study pulsars\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/pulsars.html\">\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/objects/agn/agntext.html\">active galactic nuclei\u003c/a>, or anything else your heart desires. It's a great way to hedge your bets.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"right\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_carma.jpg\">\u003cem>Several of the 15 CARMA antennas.\u003cbr>\nCredit: Andrew A. West, U.C. Berkeley,\u003cbr>\nRadio Astronomy Lab.\u003c/em>\u003c/span>Moving up in the electromagnetic spectrum, the CARMA array is the union of a (\u003ca href=\"http://www.ovro.caltech.edu/\">CalTech\u003c/a> instrument and a \u003ca href=\"http://bima.astro.umd.edu/\">Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland\u003c/a> instrument that is now in the mountains above Owens Valley. These telescopes are designed for observations in mm-wave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. There are quite a few molecular emission lines that can be observed at these wavelengths. These lines trace out the distribution of carbon monoxide and other compounds that are associated with star births. Among other projects, astronomers use these telescopes to map out regions of the Milky Way and other nearby galaxies that are forming huge new systems of stars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I've talked quite a bit in the past about the Keck Telescope, I'll leave it as a assignment for the reader to go back through some old posts for the science you can do with one of the largest optical telescopes in the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cem>\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_kdawson.jpg\">\u003c/em>\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Kyle S. Dawson\u003c/strong> is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and development of a proposed space-based telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://www.lbl.gov/\" target=\"_blank\">Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cbr clear=\"all\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"geo\"> latitude: \u003cspan class=\"latitude\">40.8174\u003c/span>, longitude: \u003cspan class=\"longitude\">-121.47\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cstrong>When it comes to our health, the Bay-Delta's fish are flunking out of school.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_fish_eat.jpg\" alt=\"\">\u003c/span>This past Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle Magazine featured an \u003ca href=\"http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=c/a/2007/10/28/CMP4SJVN8.DTL\">eye-opening story on Cambodian subsistence fishers in Stockton\u003c/a> and the health concerns they face from a diet dependent on Delta fish. The piece illustrates how water quality in the Delta is an ecosystem issue and a public health issue and an environmental justice issue as well: The Delta's subsistence fishers--who often come from among the area's immigrant populations--face disproportionate exposure to contaminants in Delta fish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like the Delta, the Bay supports numerous recreational and subsistence fishers. But they, too, need to be cautious about how often they indulge in a fresh-caught meal from the Bay. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.bay.org/ecological_scorecard.htm\">The Bay Institute's San Francisco Bay Index\u003c/a>--a \"report card\" on the health of the Bay released in 2005--our scientists crunched numbers from Bay monitoring projects. They found that \u003cstrong>80% of the common sport fish caught in the Bay exceeded EPA screening levels for human consumption for at least one contaminant\u003c/strong>. That was actually an improvement from our previous report card, which looked at data from the year 2000 and found that 94% of fish sampled exceeded screening levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The contaminants studied include mercury, an element that occurs naturally in the Coast Range. Historic mining of mercury and gold released substantial amounts of mercury into the Bay's watershed, where it continues to wash downstream to the Bay and persist in Bay sediments. They also include \"legacy\" contaminants such as PCBs, DDT, and Chlordanes, poisonous chemicals whose manufacture is now banned or restricted but which, decades later, continue to hang around in the Bay environment. All of these contaminants are absorbed by plankton and \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnify\">biomagnify\u003c/a> as they move up the food web, concentrating in the flesh of the larger sport fish favored by anglers. In humans, their effects can range from neurological disorders to developmental abnormalities to cancer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How much Bay fish is too much? \u003ca href=\"http://www.oehha.ca.gov/fish/general/sfbaydelta.html\">California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment\u003c/a> recommends that women past childbearing age and men eat no more than two meals per month of San Francisco Bay sport fish. Women of childbearing age and children are advised to eat no more than one meal of Bay fish per month.\u003cbr>\nThe good news is that decades of efforts to implement the Clean Water Act have reduced direct discharges of pollutants to the Bay. The bad news is that polluted runoff and sediments continue to be a problem, and reduced freshwater inflows and the loss of wetlands have crippled the Bay's abilities to absorb and filter contaminants. In addition, more than century of pollution has left its impact on the Bay--an unhappy legacy still finding its way onto our dinner plates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_annd.jpg\" alt=\"\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Ann Dickinson\u003c/strong> is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (\u003ca href=\"http://www.bay.org\">www.bay.org\u003c/a>), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, \"from the Sierra to the sea.\"\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"geo\">latitude \u003cspan class=\"latitude\">37.9783\u003c/span>, longitude \u003cspan class=\"longitude\">-121.371\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>When it comes to our health, the Bay-Delta's fish are flunking out of school.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_fish_eat.jpg\" alt=\"\">\u003c/span>This past Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle Magazine featured an \u003ca href=\"http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=c/a/2007/10/28/CMP4SJVN8.DTL\">eye-opening story on Cambodian subsistence fishers in Stockton\u003c/a> and the health concerns they face from a diet dependent on Delta fish. The piece illustrates how water quality in the Delta is an ecosystem issue and a public health issue and an environmental justice issue as well: The Delta's subsistence fishers--who often come from among the area's immigrant populations--face disproportionate exposure to contaminants in Delta fish.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like the Delta, the Bay supports numerous recreational and subsistence fishers. But they, too, need to be cautious about how often they indulge in a fresh-caught meal from the Bay. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.bay.org/ecological_scorecard.htm\">The Bay Institute's San Francisco Bay Index\u003c/a>--a \"report card\" on the health of the Bay released in 2005--our scientists crunched numbers from Bay monitoring projects. They found that \u003cstrong>80% of the common sport fish caught in the Bay exceeded EPA screening levels for human consumption for at least one contaminant\u003c/strong>. That was actually an improvement from our previous report card, which looked at data from the year 2000 and found that 94% of fish sampled exceeded screening levels.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The contaminants studied include mercury, an element that occurs naturally in the Coast Range. Historic mining of mercury and gold released substantial amounts of mercury into the Bay's watershed, where it continues to wash downstream to the Bay and persist in Bay sediments. They also include \"legacy\" contaminants such as PCBs, DDT, and Chlordanes, poisonous chemicals whose manufacture is now banned or restricted but which, decades later, continue to hang around in the Bay environment. All of these contaminants are absorbed by plankton and \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomagnify\">biomagnify\u003c/a> as they move up the food web, concentrating in the flesh of the larger sport fish favored by anglers. In humans, their effects can range from neurological disorders to developmental abnormalities to cancer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How much Bay fish is too much? \u003ca href=\"http://www.oehha.ca.gov/fish/general/sfbaydelta.html\">California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment\u003c/a> recommends that women past childbearing age and men eat no more than two meals per month of San Francisco Bay sport fish. Women of childbearing age and children are advised to eat no more than one meal of Bay fish per month.\u003cbr>\nThe good news is that decades of efforts to implement the Clean Water Act have reduced direct discharges of pollutants to the Bay. The bad news is that polluted runoff and sediments continue to be a problem, and reduced freshwater inflows and the loss of wetlands have crippled the Bay's abilities to absorb and filter contaminants. In addition, more than century of pollution has left its impact on the Bay--an unhappy legacy still finding its way onto our dinner plates.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_CosmicCasms.jpg\">\u003cem>The Very Large Array radio telescope\u003cbr>\nfacility in New Mexico, the tool used to find a cosmic supervoid.\u003cbr>\nCredit: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)\u003c/em>\u003c/span>There's been some excitement in the world of cosmology in recent weeks surrounding the discovery of a really, really big \"hole\" in space--not a \u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/black_holes.html\" target=\"_blank\">black hole\u003c/a>, which is a small and matter-dense object, but a vast gulf of emptiness far larger than any other similar voids yet found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You might say, don't scientists tell us that space in general is pretty much empty, no matter where you look between the stars and planets, or between the galaxies? What's the big deal with finding yet more emptiness out there?\u003cbr>\nWell, everything is relative. Take a place like the Milky Way Galaxy, for instance. A galaxy is a region of space crowded with matter in the form of gaseous nebulas, dust, stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets--a bustling \"city\" of material. Never mind that the huge gaps between the stars are nearly empty space; the point is that a galaxy is a relatively matter-rich zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not so with cosmic voids. Scientists have known of voids for some time. As astronomers have surveyed the universe and pinned down the locations and distances of large numbers of galaxies, a structure to their arrangement has emerged. Galaxies stick together, by gravity, in groups called \u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/topics/clusters_group/clusters_intro.html\" target=\"_blank\">galaxy clusters\u003c/a>, which in turn form larger groupings called \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_superclusters\" target=\"_blank\">superclusters\u003c/a>. These clusters and superclusters in turn are arranged in vast membrane-like \"sheets\" and filaments, like the walls of soap bubbles or sponge cake. Between the sheets and filaments, similar to soap bubbles and sponge cake, are large regions void of material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recent and startling discovery, which has caused all the excitement, is of a void that might be as big as a billion light years across! This particular void was discovered by astronomers using the \u003ca href=\"http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12546-biggest-void-in-space-is-1-billion-light-years-across.html\" target=\"_blank\">Very Large Array\u003c/a> (VLA) radio telescope facility in New Mexico. (The VLA was made somewhat famous in the movie \u003cem>Contact\u003c/em> when it received a phone call from an Extra Terrestrial.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How can we get our heads around the concept of a billion-light-year \"bubble\" of nothing? Well, we try to get our heads around it with an analogy, such as this: A galaxy the size of the Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years across, sitting on the edge of this billion-light-year void is comparable in scale to a human standing next to the 10-mile-wide Grand Canyon--and feeling very, very small...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This newly discovered king of voids is nowhere near the Milky Way--it's somewhere between 6 and 10 billion light years away. There is a nearby void, called the \u003ca href=\"http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn11971-dwarfflinging-void-is-larger-than-thought.html\" target=\"_blank\">Local Void\u003c/a>, which is partially bounded by the filament of galaxies which the Milky Way is a part of. However, the Local Void is small in comparison to this newly discovered and more distant, gargantuan cousin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But more than this \"big empty\" being just a really large version of other known empties, the sheer size of this one has taken astronomers and cosmologists a bit by surprise. Its discovery even has some experts worrying that our understanding of the formation of the universe may need some serious revision to account for the existence of this superhole.\u003cbr>\nIt's a bit too early to say anything for certain about the implications of this find, other than the absolute certainty that scientists have quite a bit of theoretical and observational work ahead of them...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cbr clear=\"all\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"geo\"> latitude: \u003cspan class=\"latitude\">37.8148\u003c/span>, longitude: \u003cspan class=\"longitude\">-122.178\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"description": "The Very Large Array radio telescope facility in New Mexico, the tool used to find a cosmic supervoid. Credit: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)There's been some excitement in the world of cosmology in recent weeks surrounding the discovery of a really, really big "hole" in space--not a black hole, which is a small and matter-dense",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_CosmicCasms.jpg\">\u003cem>The Very Large Array radio telescope\u003cbr>\nfacility in New Mexico, the tool used to find a cosmic supervoid.\u003cbr>\nCredit: National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)\u003c/em>\u003c/span>There's been some excitement in the world of cosmology in recent weeks surrounding the discovery of a really, really big \"hole\" in space--not a \u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/black_holes.html\" target=\"_blank\">black hole\u003c/a>, which is a small and matter-dense object, but a vast gulf of emptiness far larger than any other similar voids yet found.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You might say, don't scientists tell us that space in general is pretty much empty, no matter where you look between the stars and planets, or between the galaxies? What's the big deal with finding yet more emptiness out there?\u003cbr>\nWell, everything is relative. Take a place like the Milky Way Galaxy, for instance. A galaxy is a region of space crowded with matter in the form of gaseous nebulas, dust, stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets--a bustling \"city\" of material. Never mind that the huge gaps between the stars are nearly empty space; the point is that a galaxy is a relatively matter-rich zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not so with cosmic voids. Scientists have known of voids for some time. As astronomers have surveyed the universe and pinned down the locations and distances of large numbers of galaxies, a structure to their arrangement has emerged. Galaxies stick together, by gravity, in groups called \u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/features/topics/clusters_group/clusters_intro.html\" target=\"_blank\">galaxy clusters\u003c/a>, which in turn form larger groupings called \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_superclusters\" target=\"_blank\">superclusters\u003c/a>. These clusters and superclusters in turn are arranged in vast membrane-like \"sheets\" and filaments, like the walls of soap bubbles or sponge cake. Between the sheets and filaments, similar to soap bubbles and sponge cake, are large regions void of material.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recent and startling discovery, which has caused all the excitement, is of a void that might be as big as a billion light years across! This particular void was discovered by astronomers using the \u003ca href=\"http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12546-biggest-void-in-space-is-1-billion-light-years-across.html\" target=\"_blank\">Very Large Array\u003c/a> (VLA) radio telescope facility in New Mexico. (The VLA was made somewhat famous in the movie \u003cem>Contact\u003c/em> when it received a phone call from an Extra Terrestrial.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How can we get our heads around the concept of a billion-light-year \"bubble\" of nothing? Well, we try to get our heads around it with an analogy, such as this: A galaxy the size of the Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years across, sitting on the edge of this billion-light-year void is comparable in scale to a human standing next to the 10-mile-wide Grand Canyon--and feeling very, very small...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This newly discovered king of voids is nowhere near the Milky Way--it's somewhere between 6 and 10 billion light years away. There is a nearby void, called the \u003ca href=\"http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn11971-dwarfflinging-void-is-larger-than-thought.html\" target=\"_blank\">Local Void\u003c/a>, which is partially bounded by the filament of galaxies which the Milky Way is a part of. However, the Local Void is small in comparison to this newly discovered and more distant, gargantuan cousin.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But more than this \"big empty\" being just a really large version of other known empties, the sheer size of this one has taken astronomers and cosmologists a bit by surprise. Its discovery even has some experts worrying that our understanding of the formation of the universe may need some serious revision to account for the existence of this superhole.\u003cbr>\nIt's a bit too early to say anything for certain about the implications of this find, other than the absolute certainty that scientists have quite a bit of theoretical and observational work ahead of them...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003cbr clear=\"all\">\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"geo\"> latitude: \u003cspan class=\"latitude\">37.8148\u003c/span>, longitude: \u003cspan class=\"longitude\">-122.178\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_snap.jpg\">\u003c/span>I am working on a project to build a space telescope named SNAP, \u003ca href=\"http://www.snap.lbl.gov\">SuperNova Acceleration Probe\u003c/a>. We have applied for funding with NASA and the Department of Energy and are competing with two other projects named DESTINY and \u003ca href=\"http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home06/aug06/adept.html\">ADEPT\u003c/a>. Crossing all of our fingers, we hope to launch the satellite into an orbit one million miles from Earth in the middle of the next decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whenever I describe this project to someone for the first time, it's easiest to say that we are trying to build a \u003ca href=\"http://hubblesite.org\">new and improved Hubble Space Telescope\u003c/a>, named after \u003ca href=\"http://www.edwinhubble.com/\">Edwin Hubble\u003c/a>. This isn't quite true, but it's pretty close. The excitement lies in the new perspective SNAP will provide. Think of being able to see the entire moon at a fine level of detail as we can only see a small crater on the moon with Hubble. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Hubble Space Telescope performs different observations for different science missions several times a day. SNAP, however, will be entirely dedicated to two missions. First, we will search for and observe approximately 2000 very distant supernovae. These supernovae are very important in cosmology for measuring the shape of the universe. We will then observe very distant galaxies across the sky to understand the timeline of the evolution of the universe (hint: it's a long timeline). I will continue to revisit these very important topics for the cosmology community in later posts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than 100 people were at a recent SNAP collaboration meeting in Paris, coming from as far away as Vancouver, Ann Arbor, Pasadena, and Philadelphia (better luck next year, Eagles). Like in all good meetings and cocktail parties, they discussed a slew of topics, ranging from the complicated effects of image quality on the data to my personal favorite, the maintenance of \u003ca href=\"http://www.myspace.com/snapsatellite\">the SNAP Myspace page\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few months ago, I actually logged into Myspace for the first time in my life to see what all the fuss was about. I found that SNAP, as a 20 yr old female from Berkeley, has made 38 friends. Some of the more impressive friends were \u003ca href=\"http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=23\">XMM-Newton\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.swift.ac.uk/\">SWIFT\u003c/a>, and \u003ca href=\"http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/\">GLAST\u003c/a>, all space-based astronomical telescopes. And, to boot, I even found Weird Al Yankovic in SNAP's extended network. Unfortunately I just checked again last night and found that he has cut off his friendship. I hear his latest hit is \"White and Nerdy\", but I guess SNAP no longer qualifies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_kdawson.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Kyle S. Dawson\u003c/strong> is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and\u003cbr>\ndevelopment of a proposed space-based telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://www.lbl.gov/\" target=\"_blank\">Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_snap.jpg\">\u003c/span>I am working on a project to build a space telescope named SNAP, \u003ca href=\"http://www.snap.lbl.gov\">SuperNova Acceleration Probe\u003c/a>. We have applied for funding with NASA and the Department of Energy and are competing with two other projects named DESTINY and \u003ca href=\"http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home06/aug06/adept.html\">ADEPT\u003c/a>. Crossing all of our fingers, we hope to launch the satellite into an orbit one million miles from Earth in the middle of the next decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whenever I describe this project to someone for the first time, it's easiest to say that we are trying to build a \u003ca href=\"http://hubblesite.org\">new and improved Hubble Space Telescope\u003c/a>, named after \u003ca href=\"http://www.edwinhubble.com/\">Edwin Hubble\u003c/a>. This isn't quite true, but it's pretty close. The excitement lies in the new perspective SNAP will provide. Think of being able to see the entire moon at a fine level of detail as we can only see a small crater on the moon with Hubble. That's what gets me out of bed in the morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Hubble Space Telescope performs different observations for different science missions several times a day. SNAP, however, will be entirely dedicated to two missions. First, we will search for and observe approximately 2000 very distant supernovae. These supernovae are very important in cosmology for measuring the shape of the universe. We will then observe very distant galaxies across the sky to understand the timeline of the evolution of the universe (hint: it's a long timeline). I will continue to revisit these very important topics for the cosmology community in later posts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than 100 people were at a recent SNAP collaboration meeting in Paris, coming from as far away as Vancouver, Ann Arbor, Pasadena, and Philadelphia (better luck next year, Eagles). Like in all good meetings and cocktail parties, they discussed a slew of topics, ranging from the complicated effects of image quality on the data to my personal favorite, the maintenance of \u003ca href=\"http://www.myspace.com/snapsatellite\">the SNAP Myspace page\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few months ago, I actually logged into Myspace for the first time in my life to see what all the fuss was about. I found that SNAP, as a 20 yr old female from Berkeley, has made 38 friends. Some of the more impressive friends were \u003ca href=\"http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=23\">XMM-Newton\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://www.swift.ac.uk/\">SWIFT\u003c/a>, and \u003ca href=\"http://glast.gsfc.nasa.gov/\">GLAST\u003c/a>, all space-based astronomical telescopes. And, to boot, I even found Weird Al Yankovic in SNAP's extended network. Unfortunately I just checked again last night and found that he has cut off his friendship. I hear his latest hit is \"White and Nerdy\", but I guess SNAP no longer qualifies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Speed of What?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_blasar.jpg\">\u003cem>An artist's concept of a \"blasar\"--a black hole\u003cbr>\nemitting jets and flares of superhot gas.\u003cbr>\nCredit: NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory/M. Weiss\u003c/em>\u003c/span>We all know what it is: 186,300 miles per second, a.k.a. the Speed of Light, the maximum speed limit in the Universe, and an absolute constant speed that all light must travel at in a vacuum, regardless of its wavelength, origin, destination, or inclination.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This Law, that light cannot exceed, or travel slower than, this speed, established by Einstein and his famous \u003ca href=\"http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/relativity.html\">Special Theory of Relativity\u003c/a>, has been drilled into most of our heads since our births--and even the most fanatical warp-driven Trekkie or hyperspace-jittery Star Wars fan or wormhole-burrowing Stargate loyalist knows it. Science fiction bends, breaks, and bypasses the law of lightspeed mainly to facilitate storylines in which characters need to travel to other stars in a reasonable amount of time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But is the sacrosanct invariability of light speed about to change, as if by magic? Some \u003ca href=\"http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8364\">recent\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1906853/posts?page=8\">articles\u003c/a> report a very unusual and unexpected observation made by researchers using \u003ca href=\"http://wwwmagic.mppmu.mpg.de/\">MAGIC\u003c/a>-- the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov telescope. The researchers were observing gamma ray outbursts from a \u003cem>blasar\u003c/em> (a black hole that occasionally emits bursts of radiation) half a billion light years away, and found that not all of the high energy photons (light \"particles\") appeared to arrive at Earth at the same time, even though they are believed to have been emitted at the same time. The higher energy gamma rays arrived up to four minutes later than lower energy photons...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's really \u003cem>weird\u003c/em>, to say the least! Sure, these photons have been traveling toward Earth for half a billion years, and in that time the alleged slow-pokes only fell behind by four minutes. Their speed was only slower by a tiny amount, but the point is--by all scientists have believed about the speed of light over the past century--there should have been no difference at all in the arrival times of the different photons!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is a little like listening to a live concert, and hearing the lower pitched sounds from the instruments before hearing the higher tones, even when the different notes were struck at the same instant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One theory is that the higher energy gamma rays are being slowed by interaction with something called \"quantum foam,\" a theoretical subatomic structure, or \"texture,\" in space itself that is predicted by quantum gravity theory. How can something that looks so constant have a \"texture?\" Imagine how the very smooth surface of a city street is actually quite rough when looked at or felt close-up, and you can envision how appearances can be a bit deceiving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What's the significance of this observation? While it doesn't show that something has been detected moving faster than 186,300 miles per second, finding high energy gamma rays that may have lost a race to fellow photons may reveal something about the nature of space that we didn't know, or had only theorized about--in this case an otherwise unobservable, theoretical property of space itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cem>\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/em>\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Speed of What?\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_blasar.jpg\">\u003cem>An artist's concept of a \"blasar\"--a black hole\u003cbr>\nemitting jets and flares of superhot gas.\u003cbr>\nCredit: NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory/M. Weiss\u003c/em>\u003c/span>We all know what it is: 186,300 miles per second, a.k.a. the Speed of Light, the maximum speed limit in the Universe, and an absolute constant speed that all light must travel at in a vacuum, regardless of its wavelength, origin, destination, or inclination.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This Law, that light cannot exceed, or travel slower than, this speed, established by Einstein and his famous \u003ca href=\"http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/vvc/theory/relativity.html\">Special Theory of Relativity\u003c/a>, has been drilled into most of our heads since our births--and even the most fanatical warp-driven Trekkie or hyperspace-jittery Star Wars fan or wormhole-burrowing Stargate loyalist knows it. Science fiction bends, breaks, and bypasses the law of lightspeed mainly to facilitate storylines in which characters need to travel to other stars in a reasonable amount of time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But is the sacrosanct invariability of light speed about to change, as if by magic? Some \u003ca href=\"http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8364\">recent\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1906853/posts?page=8\">articles\u003c/a> report a very unusual and unexpected observation made by researchers using \u003ca href=\"http://wwwmagic.mppmu.mpg.de/\">MAGIC\u003c/a>-- the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov telescope. The researchers were observing gamma ray outbursts from a \u003cem>blasar\u003c/em> (a black hole that occasionally emits bursts of radiation) half a billion light years away, and found that not all of the high energy photons (light \"particles\") appeared to arrive at Earth at the same time, even though they are believed to have been emitted at the same time. The higher energy gamma rays arrived up to four minutes later than lower energy photons...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's really \u003cem>weird\u003c/em>, to say the least! Sure, these photons have been traveling toward Earth for half a billion years, and in that time the alleged slow-pokes only fell behind by four minutes. Their speed was only slower by a tiny amount, but the point is--by all scientists have believed about the speed of light over the past century--there should have been no difference at all in the arrival times of the different photons!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is a little like listening to a live concert, and hearing the lower pitched sounds from the instruments before hearing the higher tones, even when the different notes were struck at the same instant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One theory is that the higher energy gamma rays are being slowed by interaction with something called \"quantum foam,\" a theoretical subatomic structure, or \"texture,\" in space itself that is predicted by quantum gravity theory. How can something that looks so constant have a \"texture?\" Imagine how the very smooth surface of a city street is actually quite rough when looked at or felt close-up, and you can envision how appearances can be a bit deceiving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What's the significance of this observation? While it doesn't show that something has been detected moving faster than 186,300 miles per second, finding high energy gamma rays that may have lost a race to fellow photons may reveal something about the nature of space that we didn't know, or had only theorized about--in this case an otherwise unobservable, theoretical property of space itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cem>\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/em>\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_lgs.jpg\">\u003cem>Here is a picture I took during a night\u003cbr>\nof observing on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.\u003cbr>\nThe laser from inside the dome at the Keck telescope\u003cbr>\ncreates an artificial star in the upper atmosphere\u003cbr>\nthat is used for adaptive optics. \u003c/em>\u003c/span>I \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/2007/09/24/testing-the-limits-of-optical-telescopes/\">mentioned before\u003c/a> that there is one major obstacle that prevents us from obtaining the best resolution possible from a ground-based telescope. The key word here is of course \"ground-based\", as opposed to \"in-orbit.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although it is quite convenient to build a telescope in a place we can actually visit, these locations have one major drawback. For the same reason that stars twinkle, any observations from the ground suffer from degraded resolution. Where we would be able to see the beautiful spiral arms and compact core of a distant galaxy in an ideal observation, we really see a blob that resembles a snowman as much as it does a galaxy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cause of this twinkling, or degradation, is the Earth's atmosphere. I like to think of the atmosphere as a boiling pot of chicken noodle soup. We are in the unfortunate position of sitting at the bottom of the pot, trying to look out through all the turbulence into the infinite kitchen. It's hard to tell exactly what's happening in the neighboring pots from this perspective, not to mention the pots that are 10 billion light years away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are two solutions to this problem; the most obvious (and most expensive) solution is to build a telescope that will be launched into space. I’m actually working on such a project and will write a bit about it next time. The other solution is a little more complicated, a technology known as \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics\">adaptive optics\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"right\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_ngc7469.gif\">\u003cem>Image courtesy of CFHT\u003c/em>\u003c/span>We use adaptive optics to tilt the lenses and mirrors in a telescope to correct the twinkling of the stars or galaxies that we are trying to observe. If my galaxy twinkles left, the optics register this disturbance and compensate by tilting left. Galaxy twinkles right, tilt right. This feedback loop happens in real time, with more than 100 measurements of the atmospheric disturbances every second. After the observations are finished, we have an image with a resolution that can be 20 times better than an image without adaptive optics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now the system needs something bright to serve as an anchor. In some cases, a bright star is near the target. It is easy to measure the position of such a star in a very short exposure, and to determine the adaptive corrections required to keep that position stable. These corrections are then applied to stabilize the observations of your target galaxy. However, most of the time no star lies close enough to the target to anchor the observations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When there is no nearby star, we use a \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_guide_star\">laser guide star\u003c/a> instead. The most common laser guide star is created with a laser tuned to a frequency that will excite sodium atoms and cause them to glow (you'll find this glowing sodium in quite a few streetlights). The laser is pointed right next to the target of the observations into a sodium layer which resides about 60 miles high in the upper atmosphere. The sodium atoms absorb and then re-emit the light in all directions. Just like a real star, this newly created artificial star is used to model the disturbances in the atmosphere and determine the corrections required to improve the resolution of the image.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several telescopes such as the \u003ca href=\"http://www.gemini.edu/sciops/instruments/adaptiveOptics/AOIndex.html\">Gemini Observatory\u003c/a>, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.eso.org/projects/aot/\">Very Large Telescope\u003c/a>, and the \u003ca href=\"http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu/optics/ao/\">Keck Observatory\u003c/a> have starting using adaptive optics, or are in the process of installing a system. The technology still has a ways to go, for example it works much better in the infra-red than in the visible part of the spectrum, it works only over a relatively small area, and produces a final resolution that can be quite difficult to interpret and model. However, adaptive optics does offer a lot of promise for greatly improving observations from all the large telescopes we build on Earth's most distant mountains. Someday I imagine that observations from these telescopes will be just as good as those from space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_kdawson.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Kyle S. Dawson\u003c/strong> is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and\u003cbr>\ndevelopment of a proposed space-based telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://www.lbl.gov/\" target=\"_blank\">Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_lgs.jpg\">\u003cem>Here is a picture I took during a night\u003cbr>\nof observing on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.\u003cbr>\nThe laser from inside the dome at the Keck telescope\u003cbr>\ncreates an artificial star in the upper atmosphere\u003cbr>\nthat is used for adaptive optics. \u003c/em>\u003c/span>I \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/2007/09/24/testing-the-limits-of-optical-telescopes/\">mentioned before\u003c/a> that there is one major obstacle that prevents us from obtaining the best resolution possible from a ground-based telescope. The key word here is of course \"ground-based\", as opposed to \"in-orbit.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although it is quite convenient to build a telescope in a place we can actually visit, these locations have one major drawback. For the same reason that stars twinkle, any observations from the ground suffer from degraded resolution. Where we would be able to see the beautiful spiral arms and compact core of a distant galaxy in an ideal observation, we really see a blob that resembles a snowman as much as it does a galaxy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The cause of this twinkling, or degradation, is the Earth's atmosphere. I like to think of the atmosphere as a boiling pot of chicken noodle soup. We are in the unfortunate position of sitting at the bottom of the pot, trying to look out through all the turbulence into the infinite kitchen. It's hard to tell exactly what's happening in the neighboring pots from this perspective, not to mention the pots that are 10 billion light years away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are two solutions to this problem; the most obvious (and most expensive) solution is to build a telescope that will be launched into space. I’m actually working on such a project and will write a bit about it next time. The other solution is a little more complicated, a technology known as \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics\">adaptive optics\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"right\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_ngc7469.gif\">\u003cem>Image courtesy of CFHT\u003c/em>\u003c/span>We use adaptive optics to tilt the lenses and mirrors in a telescope to correct the twinkling of the stars or galaxies that we are trying to observe. If my galaxy twinkles left, the optics register this disturbance and compensate by tilting left. Galaxy twinkles right, tilt right. This feedback loop happens in real time, with more than 100 measurements of the atmospheric disturbances every second. After the observations are finished, we have an image with a resolution that can be 20 times better than an image without adaptive optics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now the system needs something bright to serve as an anchor. In some cases, a bright star is near the target. It is easy to measure the position of such a star in a very short exposure, and to determine the adaptive corrections required to keep that position stable. These corrections are then applied to stabilize the observations of your target galaxy. However, most of the time no star lies close enough to the target to anchor the observations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When there is no nearby star, we use a \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_guide_star\">laser guide star\u003c/a> instead. The most common laser guide star is created with a laser tuned to a frequency that will excite sodium atoms and cause them to glow (you'll find this glowing sodium in quite a few streetlights). The laser is pointed right next to the target of the observations into a sodium layer which resides about 60 miles high in the upper atmosphere. The sodium atoms absorb and then re-emit the light in all directions. Just like a real star, this newly created artificial star is used to model the disturbances in the atmosphere and determine the corrections required to improve the resolution of the image.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Several telescopes such as the \u003ca href=\"http://www.gemini.edu/sciops/instruments/adaptiveOptics/AOIndex.html\">Gemini Observatory\u003c/a>, the \u003ca href=\"http://www.eso.org/projects/aot/\">Very Large Telescope\u003c/a>, and the \u003ca href=\"http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu/optics/ao/\">Keck Observatory\u003c/a> have starting using adaptive optics, or are in the process of installing a system. The technology still has a ways to go, for example it works much better in the infra-red than in the visible part of the spectrum, it works only over a relatively small area, and produces a final resolution that can be quite difficult to interpret and model. However, adaptive optics does offer a lot of promise for greatly improving observations from all the large telescopes we build on Earth's most distant mountains. Someday I imagine that observations from these telescopes will be just as good as those from space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_kdawson.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Kyle S. Dawson\u003c/strong> is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and\u003cbr>\ndevelopment of a proposed space-based telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://www.lbl.gov/\" target=\"_blank\">Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_jung.jpg\">\u003cem>The Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object visible\u003cbr>\nto the unaided eye. Credit: Conrad Jung\u003c/em>\u003c/span>Very often, the term \"naked eye\" is used to describe what can be seen with human eyes alone, unaided by tools like telescopes, microscopes, infrared cameras, ultraviolet detectors, and so on. Back in the mid 20th Century, then director of Chabot Observatory, Earl Linsley, coined what he felt was a more accurate (and maybe less provocative?) term to describe what can be seen in the night sky with unaugmented human vision: the unaided eye.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, without telescope or binoculars, filters or crystal balls, what are we seeing when we look at a night sky full of stars? I mean, what are we really looking at? How much of the Universe meets our unaided eyes? How far into space are we seeing?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short, not a lot--not very far. Let's ignore the objects of our solar system for the moment--which would include the Sun, the Moon, the five \"visible\" planets, and the occasional comet. That leaves a multitude of individual stars and some star clusters, the ghostly arch of the \u003ca href=\"http://seds.org/messier/more/mw.html\">Milky Way\u003c/a>, the misty blotches of the two nearby dwarf galaxies called the \u003ca href=\"http://www.astr.ua.edu/gifimages/lmc_smc.html\">Large and Small Magellanic Clouds\u003c/a> (visible from the Southern Hemisphere), and the barely perceptible smudge of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/andromeda.htm\">Andromeda Galaxy\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The individual stars you can see, from the brightest beacons to those that barely tickle your dark-adapted retinas, number about 9000 across the entire sky (as seen in every direction, if the Earth were not in the way).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The closest of these, the triple star system Alpha Centauri, is about 4.3 light years away (each light year is equal to about 6 trillion miles).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Within the small group of brightest stellar luminaries (numbering about 25), the most distant is \u003ca href=\"http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/deneb.html\">Deneb\u003c/a>, the \"tail\" star of the constellation Cygnus the Swan, which is about 1600 light years away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most distant individual star visible to the unaided eye is a little over 4000 light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia--and though it appears to us as a fairly faint star, it is in reality a supergiant star over \u003ca href=\"http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/rho-cas.htm\">100,000 times more luminous than our Sun\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, most of the sky is comprised of about 9000 stars ranging in distance from 4 to 4000 light years. As it turns out, the patch of the Universe where these stars exist is a small \"bubble\" of space set within the much larger expanse of the Milky Way galaxy, which overall is 100,000 light years across and contains at least 200 billion stars...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Put into an analogy, if the entire surface of the Earth represents the expanse of the Milky Way galaxy, then the region encompassing the stars visible to our unaided human eyes would be roughly the size of California--with most of them contained in an even smaller area. In short, most of what you see in the sky are not only the closest things to us in the Universe, they're pretty much the closest things to us merely in our own galaxy!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But not the most distant object visible to the unaided eye, the Andromeda Galaxy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away--so its light reaching us today left there when the earliest hominids were walking the Earth. Sounds pretty far away, but put into perspective, if the entire known Universe were represented by a full-sized football stadium (seating included), then the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy--the farthest we can see with our eyes in the dark of the cosmos--would be about three inches away...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"description": "The Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object visible to the unaided eye. Credit: Conrad JungVery often, the term "naked eye" is used to describe what can be seen with human eyes alone, unaided by tools like telescopes, microscopes, infrared cameras, ultraviolet detectors, and so on. Back in the mid 20th Century, then director of Chabot",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_jung.jpg\">\u003cem>The Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object visible\u003cbr>\nto the unaided eye. Credit: Conrad Jung\u003c/em>\u003c/span>Very often, the term \"naked eye\" is used to describe what can be seen with human eyes alone, unaided by tools like telescopes, microscopes, infrared cameras, ultraviolet detectors, and so on. Back in the mid 20th Century, then director of Chabot Observatory, Earl Linsley, coined what he felt was a more accurate (and maybe less provocative?) term to describe what can be seen in the night sky with unaugmented human vision: the unaided eye.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, without telescope or binoculars, filters or crystal balls, what are we seeing when we look at a night sky full of stars? I mean, what are we really looking at? How much of the Universe meets our unaided eyes? How far into space are we seeing?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In short, not a lot--not very far. Let's ignore the objects of our solar system for the moment--which would include the Sun, the Moon, the five \"visible\" planets, and the occasional comet. That leaves a multitude of individual stars and some star clusters, the ghostly arch of the \u003ca href=\"http://seds.org/messier/more/mw.html\">Milky Way\u003c/a>, the misty blotches of the two nearby dwarf galaxies called the \u003ca href=\"http://www.astr.ua.edu/gifimages/lmc_smc.html\">Large and Small Magellanic Clouds\u003c/a> (visible from the Southern Hemisphere), and the barely perceptible smudge of the \u003ca href=\"http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/andromeda.htm\">Andromeda Galaxy\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The individual stars you can see, from the brightest beacons to those that barely tickle your dark-adapted retinas, number about 9000 across the entire sky (as seen in every direction, if the Earth were not in the way).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The closest of these, the triple star system Alpha Centauri, is about 4.3 light years away (each light year is equal to about 6 trillion miles).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Within the small group of brightest stellar luminaries (numbering about 25), the most distant is \u003ca href=\"http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/deneb.html\">Deneb\u003c/a>, the \"tail\" star of the constellation Cygnus the Swan, which is about 1600 light years away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most distant individual star visible to the unaided eye is a little over 4000 light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia--and though it appears to us as a fairly faint star, it is in reality a supergiant star over \u003ca href=\"http://www.solstation.com/x-objects/rho-cas.htm\">100,000 times more luminous than our Sun\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, most of the sky is comprised of about 9000 stars ranging in distance from 4 to 4000 light years. As it turns out, the patch of the Universe where these stars exist is a small \"bubble\" of space set within the much larger expanse of the Milky Way galaxy, which overall is 100,000 light years across and contains at least 200 billion stars...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Put into an analogy, if the entire surface of the Earth represents the expanse of the Milky Way galaxy, then the region encompassing the stars visible to our unaided human eyes would be roughly the size of California--with most of them contained in an even smaller area. In short, most of what you see in the sky are not only the closest things to us in the Universe, they're pretty much the closest things to us merely in our own galaxy!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But not the most distant object visible to the unaided eye, the Andromeda Galaxy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.5 million light years away--so its light reaching us today left there when the earliest hominids were walking the Earth. Sounds pretty far away, but put into perspective, if the entire known Universe were represented by a full-sized football stadium (seating included), then the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy--the farthest we can see with our eyes in the dark of the cosmos--would be about three inches away...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_clafoutis.jpg\">\u003c/span>As I continue to answer questions from \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/2007/07/30/out-of-the-office\">my earlier solicitation\u003c/a>, I am going to skip ahead to the question:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"\u003cem>How large would a cherry clafouti near the Moon's equator have to be to be easily identifiable as a cherry clafouti, assuming clear conditions of observation?\u003c/em>\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first glance, this appears to be an absurd question, but a \u003ca href=\"http://whatscookingamerica.net/Cake/CherryClafouti.htm\">cherry clafouti\u003c/a> is one of my favorite desserts. It is also a good lead-in to a discussion of what we can actually see from Earth. Whether it be a delicious dessert, a meteor crater, or a distant galaxy, it is very difficult to build instruments that are capable of resolving distant objects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1). First of all, just how distant is this caflouti?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The average distance from the \u003ca href=\"http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/ApolloLaser.html\">center of the Earth to the center of the moon\u003c/a> is about 385,000 km, or 38,500,000,000 cm. As I did some research online for this post, I read someone's comment that this is about 10 round-trip flights to Australia from SFO.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2). Second of all, how big is a clafouti?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This of course depends on the baker, but for now, I declare that the clafouti is baked in a 9-inch pie pan. Considering that there are 2.54 cm in one inch, this equates to 9 in * 2.54 cm/1 in = 22.86 cm. So why do I care about these measurements? Well, to predict what can be seen from earth, we need to know at how large an angle the object appears. For small objects, this angle is simply the height divided by the distance. In the example above, the angle (in units of \u003ca href=\"http://id.mind.net/~zona/mmts/trigonometryRealms/radianDemo1/RadianDemo1.html\">radians\u003c/a>) is the diameter of the clafouti divided by distance to the clafouti, or 22.86 cm/38,500,000,000 cm = 5.94 * 10\u003csup>-10\u003c/sup> radians. The angular resolution of a telescope depends on the wavelength of the light being observed and the diameter of the telescope. This angle is called the \u003ca href=\"http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses//astro201/diff_limit.htm\">diffraction limit\u003c/a>. Skipping the complicated math, the diffraction limit of a telescope is 1.22 times the wavelength divided by the diameter. We'll assume that the telescope and camera are sensitive to light that is visible to the eye. The \u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html\">wavelength of light\u003c/a> in this range is about 400 nm to 700 nm, ranging from blue to red. We'll take green light for our calculations, in the middle around 500 nm, or 500 nm * 1 m/1,000,000,000 nm = 5 * 10\u003csup>-7\u003c/sup> m. Looking through the 1-meter telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes_Observatory\">Yerkes Observatory\u003c/a> that Michael mentioned, we can resolve objects that appear at angles larger than 1.22 * 5 * 10-7 m/1 m, or 6.1 * 10\u003csup>-7\u003c/sup> radians. To see down to clafouti scales as small as 5.94 * 10-10 radians, \u003cstrong>we would need a telescope ~1000 meters in diameter\u003c/strong>. The biggest optical telescope in the world at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.keckobservatory.org/\">Keck Observatory\u003c/a>, and is only 10 meters in diameter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In theory, this telescope can resolve objects on the moon as small as 100 clafoutis across, or 75 feet across, about the size of a baseball diamond. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, there is one obstacle to obtaining this resolution from the ground, any ideas what that can be?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_kdawson.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Kyle S. Dawson\u003c/strong> is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and\u003cbr>\ndevelopment of a proposed space-based telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://www.lbl.gov/\" target=\"_blank\">Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"description": "As I continue to answer questions from my earlier solicitation, I am going to skip ahead to the question: "How large would a cherry clafouti near the Moon's equator have to be to be easily identifiable as a cherry clafouti, assuming clear conditions of observation?" At first glance, this appears to be an absurd question,",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_clafoutis.jpg\">\u003c/span>As I continue to answer questions from \u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/2007/07/30/out-of-the-office\">my earlier solicitation\u003c/a>, I am going to skip ahead to the question:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"\u003cem>How large would a cherry clafouti near the Moon's equator have to be to be easily identifiable as a cherry clafouti, assuming clear conditions of observation?\u003c/em>\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At first glance, this appears to be an absurd question, but a \u003ca href=\"http://whatscookingamerica.net/Cake/CherryClafouti.htm\">cherry clafouti\u003c/a> is one of my favorite desserts. It is also a good lead-in to a discussion of what we can actually see from Earth. Whether it be a delicious dessert, a meteor crater, or a distant galaxy, it is very difficult to build instruments that are capable of resolving distant objects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>1). First of all, just how distant is this caflouti?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The average distance from the \u003ca href=\"http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/ApolloLaser.html\">center of the Earth to the center of the moon\u003c/a> is about 385,000 km, or 38,500,000,000 cm. As I did some research online for this post, I read someone's comment that this is about 10 round-trip flights to Australia from SFO.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>2). Second of all, how big is a clafouti?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This of course depends on the baker, but for now, I declare that the clafouti is baked in a 9-inch pie pan. Considering that there are 2.54 cm in one inch, this equates to 9 in * 2.54 cm/1 in = 22.86 cm. So why do I care about these measurements? Well, to predict what can be seen from earth, we need to know at how large an angle the object appears. For small objects, this angle is simply the height divided by the distance. In the example above, the angle (in units of \u003ca href=\"http://id.mind.net/~zona/mmts/trigonometryRealms/radianDemo1/RadianDemo1.html\">radians\u003c/a>) is the diameter of the clafouti divided by distance to the clafouti, or 22.86 cm/38,500,000,000 cm = 5.94 * 10\u003csup>-10\u003c/sup> radians. The angular resolution of a telescope depends on the wavelength of the light being observed and the diameter of the telescope. This angle is called the \u003ca href=\"http://astrosun2.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses//astro201/diff_limit.htm\">diffraction limit\u003c/a>. Skipping the complicated math, the diffraction limit of a telescope is 1.22 times the wavelength divided by the diameter. We'll assume that the telescope and camera are sensitive to light that is visible to the eye. The \u003ca href=\"http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/emspectrum.html\">wavelength of light\u003c/a> in this range is about 400 nm to 700 nm, ranging from blue to red. We'll take green light for our calculations, in the middle around 500 nm, or 500 nm * 1 m/1,000,000,000 nm = 5 * 10\u003csup>-7\u003c/sup> m. Looking through the 1-meter telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes_Observatory\">Yerkes Observatory\u003c/a> that Michael mentioned, we can resolve objects that appear at angles larger than 1.22 * 5 * 10-7 m/1 m, or 6.1 * 10\u003csup>-7\u003c/sup> radians. To see down to clafouti scales as small as 5.94 * 10-10 radians, \u003cstrong>we would need a telescope ~1000 meters in diameter\u003c/strong>. The biggest optical telescope in the world at the \u003ca href=\"http://www.keckobservatory.org/\">Keck Observatory\u003c/a>, and is only 10 meters in diameter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In theory, this telescope can resolve objects on the moon as small as 100 clafoutis across, or 75 feet across, about the size of a baseball diamond. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, there is one obstacle to obtaining this resolution from the ground, any ideas what that can be?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_kdawson.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Kyle S. Dawson\u003c/strong> is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and\u003cbr>\ndevelopment of a proposed space-based telescope at \u003ca href=\"http://www.lbl.gov/\" target=\"_blank\">Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory\u003c/a>\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/blog_sirius.jpg\">\u003cem>Credit: H.E. Bond, E. Nelan, M. Burleigh,\u003cbr>\nJ.B. Holberg, STScI, NASA; The bright star Sirius,\u003cbr>\nseen through the Hubble Space Telescope.\u003cbr>\n\u003c/em>\u003c/span>It's time to talk about those lights in the sky. \"What does he mean?\" you’re thinking, \"This is an astronomy blog; isn't astronomy all about those lights in the sky?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I'm not talking about \u003cem>those \u003c/em>lights--stars, planets, Sun, and Moon. Those are the ones we've \u003cstrong>identified\u003c/strong>. I'm talking about the \"U-word\" of astronomy: \u003cstrong>UFOs\u003c/strong>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of the phone calls and emails I get from people with a sky question, one of the most common categories are amazing things they've seen in the sky that they can't explain or identify.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here's the archetypal anecdote, told to me by someone who we'll simply call \"Bob.\" Bob came into work a few days ago, and through the fog to the east saw the Full Moon. To his credit, Bob couldn’t believe his eyes, for he knew enough about the ways of the Moon to know it shouldn't be anywhere near Full at the time. After a period of bewilderment, Bob saw the light: he was looking at the \u003cstrong>Sun, filtered drastically by the fog\u003c/strong>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Very often, I am able to supply the inquisitor with a plausible candidate for the apparition they've witnessed. They say there are more car accidents around Full Moon. I also note a rise in sightings of inexplicable lights when Venus or the bright star Sirius is visible in the sky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"http://www.nineplanets.org/venus.html\">Venus\u003c/a>\u003c/strong> can be astonishingly bright. I recall in childhood getting up at 4:00 AM to see Venus. Even though I expected it to be bright, I was still taken by surprise. I could see my own shadow cast by Venus' light onto a nearby juniper bush!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960902.html\">Sirius\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, was that quintessential sight that sparked my interest in astronomy. Its light, refracted and distorted by atmospheric effects, forms a twinkling, prismatic bouquet of color, making it a unique spectacle among stars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"http://www.amsmeteors.org/\">Bright meteor trails\u003c/a>\u003c/strong> are another impetus for those urgent, late-night calls to the astronomy 9-1-1 voice line (my phone).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, of course, there are the inevitable accounts that I cannot give a plausible explanation for. It's the stories of \u003cem>moving \u003c/em>objects with \u003cem>blinking \u003c/em>lights, which the observer swears was not an airplane, blimp, helicopter, or other explicable vehicle, that leaves me with little choice but to say, \"Gee whiz, I wish I’d seen that too!\" On these occasions, the plausible explanation must be that they have seen some kind of aircraft, no matter how unusual it may have appeared. I don't rule out \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO\">extraterrestrial spacecraft\u003c/a>--having no evidence for or against--but I'm never in a mood to suggest that's what someone saw...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Okay, here's my embarrassing UFO story. Back in my 20's, I was driving north along 395, from Death Valley toward Mono Lake. Suddenly, a cloud appeared out of thin air, ahead in the distance. Then, just as suddenly, the cloud vanished! I blinked my eyes, and it appeared again! I stopped the car, there about a mile from the middle of nowhere, got out, closed the door, walked to the front of the car, put my hands on my hips, and set my eyes and jaw in a stance determined to understand what I was seeing. Then, I realized something, nodded my head, rolled my eyes, and said out loud, \"I just locked my keys in the car.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Epilogue: I did regain entry to the car by exploiting a flaw in its design--and the mysterious appearing/disappearing cloud turned out to be a \u003cstrong>large flock of pelicans\u003c/strong> turning together, in unison presenting their brown tops and white undersides... mystery solved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"description": "Credit: H.E. Bond, E. Nelan, M. Burleigh, J.B. Holberg, STScI, NASA; The bright star Sirius, seen through the Hubble Space Telescope. It's time to talk about those lights in the sky. "What does he mean?" you’re thinking, "This is an astronomy blog; isn't astronomy all about those lights in the sky?" I'm not talking about",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"http://www.nineplanets.org/venus.html\">Venus\u003c/a>\u003c/strong> can be astonishingly bright. I recall in childhood getting up at 4:00 AM to see Venus. Even though I expected it to be bright, I was still taken by surprise. I could see my own shadow cast by Venus' light onto a nearby juniper bush!\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960902.html\">Sirius\u003c/a>\u003c/strong>, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, was that quintessential sight that sparked my interest in astronomy. Its light, refracted and distorted by atmospheric effects, forms a twinkling, prismatic bouquet of color, making it a unique spectacle among stars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003ca href=\"http://www.amsmeteors.org/\">Bright meteor trails\u003c/a>\u003c/strong> are another impetus for those urgent, late-night calls to the astronomy 9-1-1 voice line (my phone).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, of course, there are the inevitable accounts that I cannot give a plausible explanation for. It's the stories of \u003cem>moving \u003c/em>objects with \u003cem>blinking \u003c/em>lights, which the observer swears was not an airplane, blimp, helicopter, or other explicable vehicle, that leaves me with little choice but to say, \"Gee whiz, I wish I’d seen that too!\" On these occasions, the plausible explanation must be that they have seen some kind of aircraft, no matter how unusual it may have appeared. I don't rule out \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO\">extraterrestrial spacecraft\u003c/a>--having no evidence for or against--but I'm never in a mood to suggest that's what someone saw...\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Okay, here's my embarrassing UFO story. Back in my 20's, I was driving north along 395, from Death Valley toward Mono Lake. Suddenly, a cloud appeared out of thin air, ahead in the distance. Then, just as suddenly, the cloud vanished! I blinked my eyes, and it appeared again! I stopped the car, there about a mile from the middle of nowhere, got out, closed the door, walked to the front of the car, put my hands on my hips, and set my eyes and jaw in a stance determined to understand what I was seeing. Then, I realized something, nodded my head, rolled my eyes, and said out loud, \"I just locked my keys in the car.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Epilogue: I did regain entry to the car by exploiting a flaw in its design--and the mysterious appearing/disappearing cloud turned out to be a \u003cstrong>large flock of pelicans\u003c/strong> turning together, in unison presenting their brown tops and white undersides... mystery solved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"left\">\u003cimg src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/quest/wp-content/uploads/sites/39/imp/icon_benb.jpg\">\u003c/span>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>Benjamin Burress\u003c/strong> is a staff astronomer at The \u003ca href=\"http://www.chabotspace.org\">Chabot Space & Science Center\u003c/a> in Oakland, CA.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
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"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
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"onourwatch": {
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"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"pbs-newshour": {
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},
"perspectives": {
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"order": 14
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
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"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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},
"reveal": {
"id": "reveal",
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