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Halvorsen is entering the robot in the BOCA Bearings 2012 Innovation Competition.

When asked about the project, Halvorsen said “MorpHex is mostly a work of art and goes in the category of hobby robotics. It’s a remotely operated robot. I believe it could be used in animatronics as a transforming robot as well. The main goal of this project was to make a hexapod robot that could transform into a sphere shape and back. In “sphere mode” the robot should be able to roll freely like a ball.”

You can find out more about MorpHex and vote for Kåre Halvorsen on the BOCA Bearings 2012 Innovation Competition website.

Below are a couple of short videos, one about M-theory and why such a theory would make God Unnecessary, and the second is 10 intriguing questions from Time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More great links:
Stephen Hawking at 70: Fellow scientists pay tribute
As cosmologists gather in Cambridge to honour Stephen Hawking on his 70th birthday, they share their recollections of meeting and working with him.

As Stephen Hawking turns 70, six life lessons you should learn from him
Physicist, cosmologist and obsessor of black holes Stephen Hawking turns 70 Sunday, despite a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease that doctors said would kill him almost five decades ago. Many scientists are taking the birthday as a chance to reflect on what the man taught us in his brilliant career

Stephen Hawking – The Official Website!

China plans to put astronaut on the moon

China has declared its intention to land an astronaut on the moon, in the first official confirmation of its aim to go where Americans last set foot nearly 40 years ago.

While Chinese scientists have previously discussed the possibility of a manned lunar mission, a government white paper published on Thursday is the first public government document to enshrine it as a policy goal.

China will “conduct studies on the preliminary plan for a human lunar landing”, the white paper said.
Although a manned moon mission is still some time off – Chinese experts say after 2020 – the statement highlights Beijing’s soaring ambitions just five months after the US retired its space shuttle programme.

Source: China push to put astronaut on the moon (FT.com)

New Island among the Zubair archipelago

The island – essentially lava that cooled after breaking through the water’s surface – began forming this month (December 2011) between Yemen and Eritrea among the Zubair archipelago, a group of small islands that come from a submarine shield volcano.

Source: Eruption creates new island in Red Sea

Zubair archipelago before the new island was formed

An eruption occurred in the Red Sea in December 2011. According to news reports, fishermen witnessed lava fountains reaching up to 30 meters (90 feet) tall on December 19. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites observed plumes on December 20 and December 22. Meanwhile, the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite detected elevated levels of sulfur dioxide, further indicating an eruption.

The activity in the Red Sea included more than an eruption. By December 23, 2011, what looked like a new island appeared in the region. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured these high-resolution, natural-color images on December 23, 2011 (top), and October 24, 2007 (bottom). The image from December 2011 shows an apparent island where there had previously been an unbroken water surface. A thick plume rises from the island, dark near the bottom and light near the top, perhaps a mixture of volcanic ash and water vapor.

The volcanic activity occurred along the Zubair Group, a collection of small islands off the west coast of Yemen. Running in a roughly northwest-southeast line, the islands poke above the sea surface, rising from a shield volcano. This region is part of the Red Sea Rift where the African and Arabian tectonic plates pull apart and new ocean crust regularly forms.

Source: Nasa

Grigory Alexandrovich Gamburtsev

Scientists say they can now explain the existence of what are perhaps Earth’s most extraordinary mountains.

The Gamburtsevs are the size of the European Alps and yet they are totally buried beneath the Antarctic ice.

Their discovery in the 1950s was a major surprise. Most people had assumed the rock bed deep within the continent would be flat and featureless.

Survey data now suggests the range first formed over a billion years ago, researchers tell the journal Nature.

Source: Gamburtsev ‘ghost mountains mystery solved’

The Gamburtsev Mountain Range (also known as the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountains) is a subglacial mountain range located in Eastern Antarctica, near Dome A. The range was discovered by the 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1958 and is named for Soviet geophysicist Grigoriy A. Gamburtsev. It is approximately 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) long, and the mountains are believed to be about 2,700 metres (8,900 ft) high, although they are completely covered by over 600 metres (2,000 ft) of ice and snow. The Gamburtsev Mountain Range is currently believed to be about the same size as the European Alps.

Residents were surprised to see the object shooting across the horizon around 2 pm. (local time) on Thursday 25th August 2011.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A suspected meteorite recently fell across the Peruvian sky over the ancient city of Cusco. Local officials were unable to determine where the suspected meteorite may have landed.

Source and more info:
Suspected meteorite caught on tape in Peru

World's oldest wood – so far

Both fossils date from the early Devonian period, by which time simple plants had long colonised the land and begun diversifying. One was found in France and dates from 407 million years ago, while the other, from Canada, is 397 million years old.

According to lead researcher Philippe Gerrienne of the University of Liège, Belgium, they predate the previous record-holders by at least 10 million years.

Source: New Scientist

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Video caption: M-FLARE AND RADIATION STORM: This morning around 0641 UT, magnetic fields above sunspot complex 1226-1227 became unstable and erupted. The blast produced an M2-class solar flare, an S1-class radiation storm, and a massive CME. A recording of the blast from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory ranks as one of the most beautiful and dramatic movies of the SDO era.

Northern Lights over Gimsøy, Norway

A powerful solar flare, hurled into space when super hot gases erupted on the sun Tuesday, is expected to cause a display of the aurora borealis (Northern Lights) on Thursday.

That’s according to the NASA space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory which said the earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) is moving at 1400 kilometres per second.

Due to its angle, however, effects on Earth should be fairly small. Nevertheless, the M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare may generate space weather effects here on Earth in a few days the Observatory said.

The sun unleashed the solar flare yesterday at about 6.41a.m. GMT from sunspot 1226, blanketing almost one third of the solar disk. The eruption resulted in a massive plasma cloud being ejected from the Sun.

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Centre has downgraded its forecast from Tuesday stating that the flare would result in some disruption to communication systems around the globe

Source: Display Of Northern Lights Expected From Solar Flare

Visitors to the Airshow China exhibition look at a model of the Tiangong-1 space station

China laid out plans for its future in space yesterday, unveiling details of an ambitious new space station to be built in orbit within a decade.

The project, which one Nasa adviser describes as a “potent political symbol”, is the latest phase in China’s rapidly developing space programme. It is less than a decade since China put a human into orbit for the first time, and three years since its first spacewalk.

The space station will weigh around 60 tonnes and consist of a core module with two laboratory units for experiments, according to the state news agency, Xinhua.

Officials have asked the public to suggest names and symbols for the unit and for a cargo spacecraft that will serve it.

Source: China unveils rival to International Space Station and the World Wide Web!

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and satellite

Love the way the press pick up on the strangest of things — almost every story about Iran’s alleged ‘successful’ launch of a rocket into space mention the word ‘Monkey’!

Iran says it has successfully launched a rocket capable of carrying animals into orbit as it presses ahead with a space program that Western powers fear could be used to develop nuclear missile capability.

The Kavoshgar-4 rocket, designed to carry a monkey, was launched on March 15, the country’s official IRNA news agency reported Thursday, according to AFP. The capsule, which was empty, reached an orbit of 75 miles, The Associated Press said.

The Iranian Space Agency managed to “test the system performance … the launch platform, engine, electronic and telemetry systems and the system of separation” between the rocket and its load.

It appears the capsule was empty, but it’s not clear if Iran plans to send animals into space.

Source: Iran claims successful launch of rocket capable of carrying monkey into space