Expedition 28 Lands
"The Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 28 Commander Andrey Borisenko, and Flight Engineers Ron Garan, and Alexander Samokutyaev in a remote area outside of the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on Friday, Sept. 16, 2011. NASA Astronaut Garan, Russian Cosmonauts Borisenko and Samokutyaev are returning from more than five months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 27 and 28 crews."
Source: NASA
Inventor shows off science in the kitchen
Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, is all about inventions. He's part of Intellectual Ventures Lab, which strives to come up with solutions to big problems such as curbing bacterial infections and improving wound care. The lab has worked on medical inventions that could save lives, improve diagnostics and conserve energy.
To be an inventor, you need to have failures, he says in this video from the CNN Ideas series. There are a lot of ideas that just won't work in practice, but you have to try out a lot of possibilities so that you can find out which of them does work, he says.
But he doesn't just innovate in medicine. He has also authored a 2,400-page cookbook that has stunning images illustrating the science of cooking, from barbecue to pot roast.
Check out more from Mhyrvold on CNN's Global Public Square, where he demonstrates how to make the perfect French fry, how to zap mosquitoes with lasers to stop the transmission of malaria and his fears that America isn't innovating enough.
#FollowFriday
Every Friday, @CNNLightYears will suggest interesting and exciting space and science Twitter accounts to follow.
Today, @CNNLightYears is giving a #FollowFriday to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), specifically the accounts that tweet about #earthquakes.
The @USGS estimates that several million earthquakes occur each year, but many of these earthquakes go undetected because they happen in remote areas or have small magnitudes. The National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) locates about 50 earthquakes each day, or about 20,000 a year, according to the USGS website.
New species of dolphin discovered off Australia
Australian researchers have discovered a new species of dolphin living right under their, uh, bottlenoses.
A population of 100 dolphins in Port Phillip Bay and 50 in the Gippsland Lakes on Australia's southern coast have been proven to be genetically unique from dolphins anywhere else in the world, Monash University doctoral researcher Kate Charlton-Robb said in a university release.
"We're very pleased to announce that yes it is a new dolphin species, and I have called it Tersiops Australis," Charlton-Robb said in an interview with Radio Australia.
The new species has been given the common name the Burrunan dolphin, meaning "large sea fish of the porpoise kind" in Aboriginal languages, she said.
The Burrunan dolphins were originally thought to be one of two bottlenose species, but researchers used DNA and skull comparisons to establish they were a new species.
Only three new dolphin species have been recognized since the late 1800s, Charlton-Robb said.
"This animal has been living right under our noses for so many years and just with combining those two different technologies, with looking at the skull morphology and the DNA, you know there's still really exciting discoveries to be made," Charlton-Robb told Radio Australia.
She said the discovery highlights the importance of conservation efforts.
"It would be a shame to discover something and then and lose it. So we really are working hard to try and protect and conserve these animals," she told Radio Australia.
And if you want to get a look at the new species, head to Port Phillip Bay.
"The animals that you would see out in the bay on a normal occasion would be this new species type," Charton-Robb told Radio Australia.
@CNNLightYears on Twitter
People in Orbit
Expedition 36 Commander
Expedition 36 Flight Engineer
Expedition 36 Flight Engineer
Contributors
-
Elizabeth Landau
Writer/Producer -
Sophia Dengo
Senior Designer
