Space Disco It's a party of astronomical proportions

The Space Disco Has Closed! But the Party Isn't Over, It's Been Relocated to a Bigger Dancefloor

Just in case you didn't know (perhaps you live in a cave with no wi-fi coverage), Discovery News has been re-branded, re-designed and re-launched. It's been re-everythinged!

The only thing you will see that is familiar is the awesome reported news articles, outstanding slide shows, incredible video and awesome-outstanding-incredible blogging. Pretty much everything we've been world-leaders in for the past 11 years stays the same, everything else has been re-vamped.

What Will John Cusack be Doing on Dec. 21, 2012? Skiing.

Wow, today has been an eventful day!

This afternoon I had a great interview with Dr. Mike Brown (a.k.a. the planet hunter who killed Pluto by discovering Eris) all about hate-mail, Pluto, Planet X and Nibiru. The full interview transcript will be online sometime during Wednesday, so be sure to check back soon.

Before I could catch a breath, I had to run to Downtown Los Angeles for the red carpet event of the premier for the new disaster movie 2012. I was especially chuffed that I was able to fire a few questions at actor John Cusack and director Roland Emmerich. Discovery News was given a good spot to ambush the actors and crew just before they walked through the doors of the Regal Cinema to watch the worldwide premier (unfortunately, I couldn't get into that party).

Kepler's Exoplanet Hunt On Hold Until 2011

Just when the extra-solar planet hunt seemed to be going so well, NASA has announced that the orbital Earth-like exoplanet hunter will not be able to detect a world like our own until 2011 at the earliest.

The Kepler space telescope was launched in March and the hope is that in the small patch of sky (containing 100,000 stars) it is focussing in on, Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting within the "habitable zones" of their parent stars will be discovered. However, there's a problem: Kepler has noisy amplifiers.

Keep in mind that the sensitive equipment on board Kepler has been designed to detect the slightest change in brightness of a star as an exoplanet passes in front, thereby slightly dimming the starlight that is falling on Kepler's charge-coupled devices (CCDs). If you're looking at a star many light years away, you can expect this dip in brightness to be infinitesimally small.

5 Frightening (But True) Space Stories

Guest blog post by HowStuffWorks.com science writer and Discovery Space contributor Robert Lamb.

There's nothing like a good horror story in space*. I grew up watching Sigourney Weaver outsmart xenomorphs in her underwear and subsequently spent a little too much time reading the likes of Stephen King's "I am the Doorway," H.P. Lovecraft's "In the Walls of Eryx" and John Steakley's "Armor." 

As a result, it's hard for me to read about space exploration without thinking of about its darker possibilities -- and I don't just mean aliens and distant Hell worlds. Leaving Earth's atmosphere is a dangerous endeavor and, major tragedies aside, there have been a number of smaller terrifying, grotesque and absurd episodes to come out of it. So if you'll allow me to serve as your cosmic Crypt Keeper for a few minutes, I thought I'd run though a few of the ones that get under my skin.

Space Corpses in the Sky: Space exploration research has claimed a number of animal lives, and while the idea of sacrificing monkeys and dogs on the altar of science is rather disheartening, the notion that there are dead simian and canine space explorers in orbit RIGHT NOW just adds to the creepiness.

Several early space missions involved re-entry procedures, but not every spacecraft was recovered. This leads many to theorize that perhaps dozens of mummified animals are still making the orbital rounds up there. Think about that the next time you wish upon a star.

Wolf Food from Heaven: All right, so that last bit of space horror was more disgusting than terrifying. It wasn't near as bad as, say, being eaten alive by wolves. Yet that's a fate that cosmonaut Alexei Leonov barely avoided in 1965. He performed the first space walk on his mission, but experienced both air leaks and material unexpected stiffening -- the latter of which made cramming himself back in the capsule a very near thing. He actually had to lower suit pressure and risk the bends scrambling back inside! Finally, Voskhod 2 went off course during re-entry and landed in the Ural mountains where Leonov and his commander were forced to wait for rescue amid the howls of hungry wolves. Air & Space Magazine has even more about the mission here.

Apollo Toilet Horrors: On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard wet his pants aboard Freedom 7, but Apollo bathroom facilities would get a lot worse before they got any better. I don't think I'm the only guy to find something fundamentally frightening about a urinal that consists only of a "condom-like fitting," a valve and the empty void of outer space. I keep thinking about that scene from "Goldfinger."

And if that wasn't bad enough, space writer Andrew Chaikin's description of going No. 2 in orbit is even worse. In "A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts," he writes about a special plastic bag that resembles "a top hat with an adhesive coating on the brim." I think you can guess how this works. Then, the whole spectacle gets even worse when you have to knead germicide into the contents. According to Chaikin, one Apollo 7 astronaut shared this bit of advice on the whole ghastly endeavor: "Get naked, allow an hour, have plenty of tissues handy."

Decompression Blues: Decompression is nasty business. If you've ever watched "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Firefly," "Outland" or either of two James Bond films, then you have at least a fiction-obscured understanding of this. All three crewmembers of Soyuz 11 died when depressurized during re-entry, but in 1965, a technician at Johnson Space Center in Houston lived to tell about the experience. While inside a vacuum chamber, the tech accidentally depressurized his space suit. His last memory before losing consciousness? The sensation of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil, according to Scientific American. The experts don't all agree on the full symptoms of rapid decompression, but among the possibilities are swollen flesh, vaporizing blood, exploding eyeballs and ruptured lungs.

Space Beast (with Two Backs): Microgravity sex is a topic of immense interest to teenage fanboys and scientists alike. Yet while the former are into it more for the prospect of kinky encounters of the fourth kind, the latter recognize it as a necessary fact of not only prolonged space missions, but the future of the human species itself. If we're ever going to leave the nest, so to speak, we're going to have to learn our way around extraterrestrial sex.

Both the United States and the former Soviet Union explored this topic from a space medicine standpoint, but (unless you believe the conspiracy theories) it took a former "Beastmaster" actress to take on Newton's laws of motion and actually design special garments for the act. Vanna Bonta's 2suit, according to Wired, is basically a pair of twin jumpsuits that open in the front (kind of like the creepy wing monsters in "Beastmaster") and fasten to each other with Velcro strips and zippers. Then you can fasten the whole two-person sex pod to a stable object -- like Captain Pike or a Guild Navigator. So is space sex still appealing, sci-fi fans? Or does it just seem awkward and creepy?

So there you have it: a quick glance at space exploration's dark corners, where monkey tombs orbit the Earth, blood vaporizes, urine freezes and sacks full of coupling cosmonauts bump rhythmically against the airlock hatch. Take some of that nightmare fuel with you this Halloween weekend.

*For that matter, there's nothing like a bad one. Hence my unfortunate affinity for "Event Horizon." Yes, I even somehow enjoyed "Jason X."

Explore a galaxy of terror at HowStuffWorks.com:
How the Apollo Spacecraft Worked
Spaced Out: Sex in Space (video)
Why are there dozens of dead animals floating in space?
What if an astronaut went on a space walk without wearing a space suit?

Image: Space travelers in 2009's "Pandorum" presumably contemplate something terrifying. Is it one of the Apollo toilet bags? (Photo courtesy Overture Films)

It's Alive! The LHC is Injected with its First Particle Beam

Like the reanimation of a super-cool corpse, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was injected with beams of particles over the weekend and the multi-billion euro project came to life. These are the first protons and lead ions the collider has seen since its famous "quench" shortly after its début power-up on Sept. 10, 2008.

The catastrophic quench nine days later was caused by an electrical short between two of the superconducting magnets between sectors 3 and 4 (the quench is therefore known as the "S34 Incident") of the 17 mile-long ring, triggering the loss of over a ton of liquid helium, ripping the heavy electromagnets from the floor.

Now the damage has been repaired and the magnets have been cooled back down to 1.9 Kelvin (-456F) -- cooler than deep space -- the system is ready to circulate its first particles since 2008. However, before the LHC can circulate ions and protons fully around its ring, particles must be injected and transported around smaller sections of the LHC first. CERN is basically "testing the water" to verify all the complex electronics are correctly calibrated and synchronized.

Amelia Earhart's Scarf to be Flown to the Space Station

This weekend, the story of legendary explorer Amelia Earhart will be told in an epic movie called "Amelia". Earhart will be played by Hilary Swank (who bares more than just a fleeting resemblance to the aviation pioneer, great casting) and the film will recount her exploits up until the point when her plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean during an attempt to be the first woman to fly around the world in 1937.

What happened to Amelia Earhart on her final flight? Discovery News: Earhart's Final Resting Place Believed Found

Earhart, who became famous as the first female to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1933, hired an official photographer named Albert Bresnik in 1932 and now his grandson is about to honor the great female aviator by carrying one of her scarves to the International Space Station (ISS).

Coming to a Twitter Client Near You: #Moonwatch

Building on the huge success of #Meteorwatch, the UK's Newbury Astronomical Society is currently preparing for the second instalment of #Moonwatch!

You might be wondering, what's this #Moonwatch? What's it got to do with Twitter? What's this "#" business?

Well, #Meteorwatch occurred during the Perseid meteor shower in mid-August, and the international response to this social media astronomical event was unprecedented. Even the mainstream media picked up on its popularity, culminating in BBC news articles and (of course) Discovery Space interviews.

Basic Chemistry for Life Detected on Exoplanet HD 209458b

These are very exciting times for extrasolar planet hunters. Dozens of new exoplanets have been discovered (some a little larger than Earth, others several times the size of Jupiter) and astronomers are refining their already sophisticated techniques to analyze the composition of the atmospheres of these distant worlds.

Take exoplanet HD 209458b for example. It might not have the most romantic of names (the designation "HD 209458" is the catalogue number of the Sun-like star it's orbiting), but this exoplanet is famous in its own right. In 1999, it was the first ever transiting exoplanet to be discovered. A transiting exoplanet is a world that passes in front of its parent star when viewed from Earth, blocking a little of the starlight for astronomers to detect and measure.

By using the parent star's light to their advantage, NASA scientists have been able to decipher what chemicals HD 209458b's atmosphere contains even though it is 150 light years from Earth. This exoplanet is a very large gas giant which has a very tight orbit around the star (it is therefore dubbed a "Hot Jupiter"), so life isn't expected to be a possibility, but HD 209458b contains the basic organic chemicals as used, and produced, by life as we know it.

The Search For Extraterrestrial Polluters

So how do you go about spotting an alien civilization? Well, you build a really big radio telescope and point it at the stars. But say ET isn't transmitting? Or say ET is transmitting, but they are too far away? What if our alien neighbors decided not to transmit radio waves? What if they're just shy and don't want the cosmos to know where they live?

The biggest limitation when trying to listen into any kind of signal is the speed of light. After all, mankind has only been transmitting radio waves for about 100 years. This means that any signal we've accidentally leaked into space has only traveled 100 light-years. In galactic scales, this is very pedestrian; the Milky Way is 100,000 light-years in diameter and 1,000 light-years thick. Only a small handful of stars have had the pleasure of listening in to our noise.

There are a few other ways we can go about searching for intelligent extraterrestrials (such as looking for observational evidence of alien mega-structures), but so far we have had little indication that intelligent life lives anywhere else apart from Earth. The universe is a huge place, it would be naive to say that we are the only intelligent form of life there is. But the fact remains: it's getting lonely out here.

First Ever Black Hole Created on Earth

No, CERN hasn't started slamming protons into each other at the Large Hadron Collider early. And no, a top secret warp drive hasn't been test-driven in Earth orbit (not that we know of anyway). In reality, an electromagnetic black hole has been fabricated in the laboratory for the first time.

Before you start getting concerned that the planet will soon be swallowed up by a rampaging singularity, the black hole in question isn't the gravitational behemoth you might find after a supernova or in the center of the Milky Way. This particular table-top black hole mimics the curvature of space-time, creating a fabricated event horizon that swallows electromagnetic radiation at microwave wavelengths.

The best thing is that this experiment isn't just for curiosity-sake, it has a practical application that could revolutionize future solar panel design, making the production of solar energy a lot more efficient than it is currently.