The annual Perseids meteor shower is on it’s way! On August 11 – 13th we will be passing through the debris cloud left by the Swift-Tuttle comet which passes close to earth. The fragments from the comet will strike earth’s atmosphere at 60 km per second. There will be roughly 1 meteor a minute for 3 days.

According to Space.com…

The event is also known as “The Tears of St. Lawrence.”

Laurentius, a Christian deacon, is said to have been martyred by the Romans in 258 AD on an iron outdoor stove. It was in the midst of this torture that Laurentius cried out:

“I am already roasted on one side and, if thou wouldst have me well cooked, it is time to turn me on the other.”

The Saint’s death was commemorated on his feast day, Aug. 10. King Phillip II of Spain built his monastery place the “Escorial,” on the plan of the holy gridiron. And the abundance of shooting stars seen annually between approximately Aug. 8 and 14 have come to be known as St. Lawrence’s “fiery tears.”

Of course, the more light pollution there is in your area the less meteors you’ll see. I’ve just gone to my mum’s in Holland, which is in the country and am expecting to see a lot.

Here’s a CNN report featuring arguably the most affable astrophysicist out there: Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson responds to a rather doomsday-like scenario Stephen Hawkins paints about aliens in a new Discovery documentary. Watch the eminent deGrasse Tyson explanation below.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been going on since the middle of last century, having been first postulated as a scientific possibility in 1959, but how far have we come and what new things have we learned?

In this Fora.tv lecture Professor Ian Morison discusses Drake’s Equation, Finding life on other planets, SETI@Home and how far we’ve progressed and what we’ve found.

If you’re interested in helping SETI out you can join the SETI@Home’s BOINC project, which will install a screensaver on your computer which will use CPU power when the PC (or Mac or Linux Machine) is idle to help go through the massive amount of data collected by the radio telescopes mentioned in the lecture. There’s even an 3nglish.co.uk SETI group you can join (search for 3nglish.co.uk when prompted to join a group).

A holiday message from the Cassini Spacecraft.

Check out the great graphics.

The cord sails past as the balloon pops at 107415 feet (at 8:26 in the video)

From the project website (which, frankly, looks horrible):

The balloon was launched at 7:44 AM, burst at 10:51 AM at 107,145 ft. and the camera landed via parachute at 11:40 AM, 89 miles from the launch site after a 3 hr. & 56 min. flight. The camera recorded a total of 4 hrs. & 22 min. of Hi-Def Video before it stopped recording 53 sec’s after landing when its 32GB of memory was full. The only thing better would have been if the camera could have recorded for several minutes more to captured the sound of us approaching and video of us opening its Styrofoam container.

Here’s the last 10 minutes of the flight (and the moment the big balloon pops, presumably due to reaching the maximum expansion limit for the balloon’s membrane) at 8:26…

The Bear-4 website goes on to mention…

Balloon remains can be seen falling past the lens at 6:27 [8:28 in the video above - sn0r] and then the fun begins as the foam box and camera inside is repeatedly struck by the antenna hanging below and the several pounds of latex remaining from the burst balloon as everything tumbles every which way back to earth at up to 7900 ft./min (90 mph) in the near vacuum until there’s enough air for the parachute to start functioning.

I also encourage you to watch the whole thing, including the set-up and launch. The full 1 hour video is similarly available for you on Youtube.

Here’s day 2 of the attempted launch of the Ares I-X rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida which was scrubbed yesterday because of terrorist string, errant ship captains without a clue and finally the weather interfering.

Follow the live feed here or view the information and videos we posted on the launch yesterday.

Update: Launch successful! Here’s the replay.

Here’s your hour-long lecture of the week, with the comically suggested title “We’re all fucked” by the organizers of the lecture.

Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and friend of Richard Dawkins talks about Cosmology and how the universe could have come from nothing and how it will all end. Krauss is also the author of many books on Physics and Cosmology, including “The Physics of Star Trek.” – which is definitely an interesting read.

Enjoy.

The Ares I, NASA’s first new rocket in decades is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Naturally we have a live feed from Spacevidcast.

NPR reports:

Tuesday morning, if all goes as planned, NASA will launch the tallest rocket in the world. It’s an experimental version of the rocket that NASA is designing to replace the aging space shuttles, and the Ares I-X test flight will be the first time in decades that NASA has tried out a new vehicle planned for astronauts.

The rocket is more than 1/3rd taller than the space shuttle. The flight itself is a test of the rocket itself and won’t actually reach into space. The payload at the top is ballast and doesn’t contain any humans. The rocket’s packed with over 700 sensors and 6 cameras that will record the 25 mile journey.

Update: a bit of string and a ship wandering into the exclusion zone have delayed the launch.

Update2: The launch has been scrubbed for today because of weather problems and the ship that strayed into the launch zone. We will feature the live launch again as and when it happens. In the mean time you can watch the NASA Launchpad video below.

After the Youtube success of the Carl Sagan/Stephen Hawking auto-tune video (as featured on our website in the article titled ‘Carl Sagan was higher than the ISS’), the composer and producer of the track, a certain John Boswell, has come out with a new site dedicated to music about science. The new website is called ‘The Symphony of Science‘.

According to the preface on the website:

The Symphony of Science is a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.

His first Youtube hit garnered him over 1 million hits on the video sharing site in just under a month, so there’s definitely an audience out there for his work. Here’s his latest video which features eminent astronomers such as Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. It is aptly titled ‘We are all connected’.