the buzz log
On Martian Time
It's hard enough getting up when the alarm blares every morning. Imagine if the dang-blasted thing set itself ahead 40 minutes every day. This sounds like a cruel hoax, but for a group of NASA scientists and engineers, it's the real deal.
The men and women working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission have committed themselves to living on Mars time. And it ain't easy. Due to the Red Planet's orbit, its days never run parallel to Earth's. Instead, each dawn shifts forward 40 minutes. According to this popular article on Space.com, the project controllers are conforming to a schedule that's "like traveling two time zones every three days." Ouch.
Hopefully, the bleary-eyed space workers won't be too wiped out to celebrate a milestone birthday. Today marks NASA's 50th birthday. To mark the occasion, Popular Mechanics has a cool interactive graphic charting every space launch ever, from the earliest days of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry to the sleek design of Burt Rutan's suborbital plane.
Martians, Watch Out! Avalanche!
On Monday, NASA released the first-ever images of avalanches on Mars. An orbiting spacecraft snapped the photos of ice and dust cascading downward in blurs of brown and white. The sudden landslides whipped up "massive debris clouds," some of which reached nearly 600 feet across.
The pictures kicked up their own rush in Buzz. Demand for "mars avalanche" roared upwards, smashing in to our top hourly movers. Related queries for "new mars images," "nasa new mars images," and "new mars images nasa" surged.
Photos of the Red Planet consistently attract lookups. Searches for "mars images" draw hundreds of thousands of hits each day, registering as our most consistently popular query for the fourth planet from the Sun. The second most popular Martian lookup over the past several weeks? "Figure on mars." Hope she wasn't caught in the debris flow.
The Martian Hoax Chronicles
Did you happen to catch that glorious view of Mars on Sunday? You know, when Mars looked as big as the moon in the sky? Chances are you've seen the email about this celestial event. Chances are even better you didn't see Mars since the email was nothing but an astronomical fib.
While a glimpse of Mars proved tantalizing to searchers, the email going around was another in a long line of email hoaxes. And this particular message seems to be on an annual orbit, circulating every year since 2003, when Mars really was notably close to the Earth.
Searches on Sunday, August 27—the big day for star gazing, according to the email—included "mars" (+98%), "moon and mars" (+202%), and "mars sighting" (+108%). "Mars viewing" queries spun up 1,691% over the course of the week. And we were heartened to see small spikes on "mars hoax," a sign that some folks caught on to the ruse.
However, disappointed sky watchers should keep their heads up. Mars will veer close to the Earth in December 2007—if you consider 55 million miles to be close.
top movers
| Rank | Subject | 1-Day Move |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ford 400 | Breakout! |
| 2 | Indonesia Ferry | Breakout! |
| 3 | Jordan Chandler | 3481% |
| 4 | Evan Chandler | 2322% |
| 5 | American Music Awards | 1841% |
| 6 | John F. Kennedy | 1529% |
| 7 | Turkey Stuffing Recipes | 1361% |
| 8 | Liam Hemsworth | 1172% |
| 9 | Lou Dobbs | 1142% |
| 10 | Hendrick Motorsports | 888% |
top leaders
| Rank | Subject | Move | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Black Friday | +340 | 1290 |
| 2 | NFL | +489 | 670 |
| 3 | Jennifer Lopez | +451 | 515 |
| 4 | New Moon | -67 | 250 |
| 5 | American Music Awards | +236 | 249 |
| 6 | UFC | -36 | 239 |
| 7 | Miley Cyrus | +66 | 169 |
| 8 | Hulu | -11 | 154 |
what's the buzz?
A subject's buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.
For more detailed information, visit our FAQ.