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The UK’s Astronomy Blog reports that the final draft proposal for the definition of planet not only doesn’t create the twin planets Pluto and Charon, but actually demotes Pluto to a dwarf planet (= not a planet) because it hasn’t cleared the neighborhood around it’s orbit.  Pluto actually shares part of its orbit with Neptune.  By symmetry doesn’t that disqualify Neptune as a planet? 

{Above} Lia and Alan get the news.  Alan expresses pffffft!  Lia is just stunninged.  They jump in the car heading back to Prague to vote down the draft proposal.  You can watch the vote online starting at 9:00 AM EDT.

As first reported by Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, the IAU will (a week from today) vote on a new definition of planet which will denominate 12 planets in our Solar System instead of 9, with many more – perhaps millions – waiting to be discovered!

Lia and Alan discuss the proposals before the IAU on the swings.  Checking the mail, they happily report that it looks like Pluto and Charon will be designated as the first twin planets! 

Why Pluto-Charon when our own Moon is larger than both Pluto and Charon?  Because the barycenter of the Pluto-Charon system is outside Pluto, while, for the Earth-Moon system it is 1700 km below the surface of the Earth.  Phil points out that, with the Moon receding from Earth at 4 cm per year, in about 40 million years [correction: make that about 3 billion years] the Earth-Moon barycenter will be outside the Earth and the Moon will then be designated a planet (that is, if the IAU doesn’t redefine planet before then). 

    

Below are the 3 new planets, and some planet candidates.

    

Later Lia and Alan prepare for travel to Prague for the conclusion of this planet-shattering IAU meeting.

 

From a Nature article (based on Technorati ranks):

0	Pharyngula	179
1	The Panda’s thumb	1647
2	RealClimate	1884
3	Cosmic Variance	2174
4	The Scientific Activist	3429
5	Respectful Insolence	3639
6	Aetiology	4989
7	Cognitive Daily	5820
8	Effect Measure	6186
9	Adventures in Ethics and Science	7844
10	Deltoid	8635
11	Uncertain Principles	8635
12	Thoughts from Kansas	9143
13	John Hawks Anthropology Weblog	10234
14	blog.bioethics.net	11423
15	In the pipeline	12353
16	Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology A Group Blog	12729
17	Stranger Fruit	12729
18	The Disgruntled Chemist	14551
19	A Blog Around the Clock	14858
20	Evolutionblog	14858
21	Gene Expression	15102
22	Mike the Mad Biologist	15258
23	Mixing Memory	16383
24	Archives of The Cheerful Oncologist Volume 2	16383
25	The Questionable Authority Archive	17403
26	Biosingularity	19236
27	Evolgen	22859
28	bootstrap analysis	24095
29	Evolving Thoughts	24405
30	Terra Sigillata	25174
31	Prometheus (Roger Pielke Jnr)	26411
32	A Few Things Ill Considered	27774
33	75 Degrees South	29544
34	Discovering biology in a digital world	33296
35	A Concerned Scientist	35121
36	Invasive Species Weblog	39698
37	Developing Intelligence	40444
38	The Daily Transcript	40444
39	Biopeer	40444
40	Stayin’ Alive	41239
41	On being a scientist and a woman	42065
42	Flags and Lollipops – Bioinformatics Blog	43778
43	The Quantum Pontiff	44796
44	Good Math, Bad Math	45603
45	nodalpoint.org – A bioinformatics weblog	46627
46	Climate Science	50909
47	The Lancelet	50909
48	Afarensis	50909
49	Three-Toed Sloth	51100

It’s Don Jeffrey Herbert’s (aka Mr. Wizard) birthday today.  He created Watch Mr. Wizard for NBC in 1951 and Mr. Wizard’s World for Nickelodeon in 1983.  One of his early books, Mr. Wizards Experiments for Young Scientists, was illustrated by Dan Noonan, who also helped Walt Kelly illustrating Pogo.  Here Egbert Elephant and his friends celebrate “Donot’s” birthday.

If you stare at the dot for 30 seconds without moving your eyes you will be shocked at the colors you see. 

Here’s how it works.  The first image is a constant brightness image with the hues (colors) reversed- it is not just a negative.  The constant brightness makes the rods in the eye perceive the b&w image accurately.  But the cones are fatigued by the colors.  Therefore when they see white, which is a full spectrum, in the b&w image they don’t respond to the fatigued colors, and thus perceive the opposite ‘true’ colors.  

This is a very interesting demonstration that color is not merely physics, i.e., the color of an object is not merely the colors that are not absorbed.  Color depends on what the neurons tell the brain, and how the brain interprets it.

Birds and reptiles have 4 types of cones that detect 4 different frequencies.  Along the way mammals lost 2 of these cones.  So dogs have very poor color vision (seeing eye dogs distinguish traffic lights by position!).  Fortunately for primates, a duplicated cone gene came into use, so we humans have 3 types of cones (long, medium, short or RGB, though ‘R’ is closer to yellow at its peak sensitivity).  But 2 of the 3 cones (both attached to the X chromosome – which males have only one of, hence the prevalence of colorblindness in males) are very close in peak frequency, unlike the widely separated 4 cones in birds and reptiles.  So not only can birds and reptiles see in more colors than humans , such as “invisible” ultraviolet, they can outsee us in colors.  At least, except for owls, we have them beat in 3D with binocular vision.

Do you see a 2 or a 5?

         

“Mox nix” derives from the German machts nichts meaning “it makes no difference.”  Yesterday the International Astronomical Union named the two newly discovered moons of Pluto Nix and Hydra.  Nyx is the Greek goddess of night, but that was nixed because there is an asteroid named Nyx.  So Nix, aka Nuit and Nut, the Egyptian goddess of the sky was used.  The ‘N” and ‘H’ are also the first letters of New Horizons, the spacecraft that will arrive at Pluto in 2015.

New Horizons was launched as the fastest spacecraft ever, at 10 miles per second (36,000 mph, ~0.005% the speed of light), and will further accelerate to 47,000 mph by using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot.  At that rate if one of the twins (Lia, of course) went to Pluto and back in 19 years, she would be about 1 second younger than Alan due to the Twin Paradox.  If the ship traveled 99% the speed of light, Lia would arrive back about 10 years younger than Alan!  Packaging this genuine fountain of youth is problematic.

Incidentally, I met Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto (in 1930), at the 1988 Stellafane Convention.

      

Fifth graders Billy Shannon and Cameron Wade got to attend the NASA rocket launch which had their own experiments aboard, thanks in a very teensy part to my financial contribution on bablog.  Today most experiments involve Menthos and Diet Coke, but here is what the elementary school students did:

The students placed nuts and bolts screwed together in tiny bottles to see whether the vibrations from the rocket will break them apart.  They also sent up plant seeds, which they will plant this summer along with seeds that haven’t been airborne to see whether there is a difference in growth.

As a former seventh grade Bronx county Science Fair winner for my project “How does a Photoelectric Cell Convert Light Energy into Electrical Energy” – which provided me the opportunity to participate in the (alas discontinued) Florida Science Study Program – I know personally how important such an experience can be to a young student/scientist.

Update, thanks to Phil.

         

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is the fear that 666 is the number of the Devil.  Aside Revelations 13, there are some peculiar theories as to the origin of the number.  June 6, 1666 was a good day for that old time blogger, Samuel Pepys, because of English victories at sea over the Dutch.  In part he wrote:

Up betimes, and vexed with my people for having a key taken out of the chamber doors and nobody knew where it was, as also with my boy for not being ready as soon as I, though I called him, whereupon I boxed him soundly, and  then to my business at the office and on the Victualling Office, and thence by water to St. James’s, whither he [the Duke of York] is now gone, it being a monthly fast-day for the plague. … Mightily pleased with this happy day’s newes, and the more, because confirmed by Sir Daniel Harvy,  who was in the whole fight with the Generall, and tells me that there appear but thirty-six in all of the Dutch fleete left at the end of the voyage when they run home.  The joy of the City was this night exceeding great.

September 2 that year was a bad day, as the Great Fire of 1666 burned down medieval London.  Pepys wrote:

Spirals of great fire and flame lept forth from every chimney and London was left but a ruin.

The fire smoldered until March of 1667.  On the bright side, the Great Fire did end the previous year’s plague and made way for the great architectural works of Christopher Wren.

Speaking of fire and history, today is the aniversary of D-Day, “The End of the Beginning” of Hitler’s Nazis, in 1944, and the shooting of James Meredith, the first black man to attend the University of Mississippi, in 1966.