Can't Get Enough Science

2011-01-10T12:34:00.000-05:00

en.wikipedia.org →

[What came to my head when I read about this: I have this feeling like maybe that tool was hidden from the religious elites. That a group of scientists during that time were on to something way before historical checkpoints in technology started happening, when Astronomy was heresy and Astrology was the light. Remember Religion at that time must have been so mainstream and thriving with serious belief that society deemed it right to execute those who did not believe in a god and people who did think scientifically and created tools and technology to aid them in their research hid it from the rest (The rest being any religious person with power over people) To avoid death/heracy/ all the bad shit that came with being logical]

The Antikythera Mechanism

It was found at the bottom of the sea aboard an ancient Greek ship. Its seeming complexity has prompted decades of study, although some of its functions remained unknown. Recent X-rays of the device have now confirmed the nature of the Antikythera mechanism, and discovered several surprising functions. The Antikythera mechanism has been discovered to be a mechanical computer of an accuracy thought impossible in 80 BC, when the ship that carried it sunk. Such sophisticated technology was not thought to be developed by humanity for another 1,000 years. Its wheels and gears create a portable orrery of the sky that predicted star and planet locations as well as lunar and solar eclipses. The Antikythera mechanism, shown above, is 33 centimeters high and similar in size to a large book.

Credit & Copyright: Wikipedia

2011-01-10T12:32:00.002-05:00

emilivanov.com →

NGC 2392 (The Eskimo Nebula)

Copyright: Niki Petrov, Yanko Nikolov, Emil Ivanov

2011-01-10T12:31:00.002-05:00

A Sun Halo Beyond Stockholm

What’s happened to the Sun? Sometimes it looks like the Sun is being viewed through a large lens. In the above case, however, there are actually millions of lenses: ice crystals. As water freezes in the upper atmosphere, small, flat, six-sided, ice crystals might be formed. As these crystals flutter to the ground, much time is spent with their faces flat, parallel to the ground. An observer may pass through the same plane as many of the falling ice crystals near sunrise or sunset. During this alignment, each crystal can act like a miniature lens, refracting sunlight into our view and creating phenomena like parhelia, the technical term for sundogs. The above image was taken last year in Stockholm, Sweden. Visible in the image center is the Sun, while two bright sundogs glow prominently from both the left and the right. Also visible is the bright 22 degree halo — as well as the rarer and much fainter 46 degree halo — also created by sunlight reflecting off of atmospheric ice crystals.

Credit & Copyright: Peter Rosén

2011-01-10T12:30:00.002-05:00

New Evidence Shows Black Hole Growth Preceding Galactic Formation

An accidental find in a star-forming dwarf galaxy shows that black holes may mature early in galaxy evolution

The co-evolution of black holes, almost unfathomable in their bulk, and the even more massive galaxies that host them remains poorly understood—a kind of chicken-and-egg problem on mammoth scales. Do black holes, such as the lunker in our own Milky Way Galaxy, which contains the mass of four million suns (that’s about eight undecillion, or 8 x 10^36 kilograms), drive the evolution of galaxies around them; or do galaxies naturally nurture the gravitational gobblers at their centers; or perhaps do they come into being together, as a matched pair?

A serendipitous discovery in a relatively close-by dwarf galaxy may help answer that question. Amy Reines, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Virginia (U.V.A.), was looking at bursts of star formation in a galaxy known as Henize 2-10, which serves as a kind of observational proxy for galaxies that existed in the early universe. She noticed a suspicious radio wave source coming from a small region of the galaxy, a good distance removed from the active stellar nurseries. A comparison with archival data showed x-ray radiation from the same location within Henize 2-10; the balance of radiation levels in different wavelengths pointed to the presence of a giant black hole accreting material from its surroundings.

2011-01-10T12:29:00.002-05:00

NASA Research Team Reveals Moon Has Earth-Like Core

State-of-the-art seismological techniques applied to Apollo-era data suggest our moon has a core similar to Earth’s.

2011-01-10T12:28:00.002-05:00

caelumobservtory.com →

The Little Flame: IC 2087
Copyright: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

2011-01-10T12:27:00.000-05:00

“The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I’m not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they’re called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.”

—	Carl Sagan

2010-10-15T03:34:00.002-04:00

Chemical Soups Around Cool Stars

This artist’s conception shows a young, hypothetical planet around a cool star. A soupy mix of potentially life-forming chemicals can be seen pooling around the base of the jagged rocks.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC)

2010-10-15T03:33:00.002-04:00

Extreme Planets

This artist’s concept depicts the pulsar planet system discovered by Aleksander Wolszczan in 1992. Wolszczan used the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to find three planets - the first of any kind ever found outside our solar system - circling a pulsar called PSR B1257+12. Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars, which are the collapsed cores of exploded massive stars. They spin and pulse with radiation, much like a lighthouse beacon. Here, the pulsar’s twisted magnetic fields are highlighted by the blue glow.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt

2010-10-15T03:32:00.000-04:00

Interesting Fact:

“Bumblebees (Bombus lucorum), a species that is often parasitized by invidious little conopid flies that insert their larva in the bee’s abdomen. Once infected, the bumblebee dies in about twelve days, and the parasitical flies pupate until their emergence the following summer. What’s interesting about this, however, is that parasitized bumblebees essentially go off to commit suicide by abandoning their colony and spending their remaining days alone in far-away flower meadows. In doing so, these infected bumblebees are leading the flies away from nonparasitized kin, increasing inclusive fitness by protecting the colony from infestation.”

2010-10-15T03:31:00.000-04:00

Unweaving the cosmic web: Relativity goes large

We’re on the verge of being able to see the structure of the entire universe. That could help us go beyond Einstein’s masterwork

2010-10-15T03:29:00.002-04:00

The Big Bounce; Cosmos Makes Inflation a Sure thing, Outrules The Big Bang

IS OUR universe a recycled version of an earlier cosmos? The idea, which replaces the big bang with a “big bounce”, has received a boost: this vision of the birth of the universe can explain why a subsequent process, called inflation, occurred.

“The result puts the idea of inflation on firmer ground, and at the same time makes the bounce scenario much more credible,” says Carlo Rovelli, who was not involved in the work but studies quantum gravity at the University of Marseille in France.

via: NS

2010-10-15T03:27:00.002-04:00

The U.S. Prison Industry: Big Business or A New Formal Way of Slavery?

2010-10-12T02:32:00.002-04:00

President Signs NASA Authorization Act

President Obama signed a major NASA act today (Oct. 11) that turns his vision for U.S. space exploration of asteroids and Mars into law. The signing makes official a NASA authorization act that scraps the space agency’s previous moon-oriented goal and paves the way for a manned mission to an asteroid by 2025. A manned mission to Mars is envisioned for some time in the 2030s. The bill also calls for a budget of $19 billion for NASA in 2011, adding one extra space shuttle flight before the fleet retires next year, and the extension of the International Space Station through at least 2020.

Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

2010-10-10T02:06:00.000-04:00

Part of the Vela supernova remnant

A supernova event marks the catastrophic end-point in the life of a massive star. The self-destruction of the star releases a huge amount of energy as radiation of all kinds, but a substantial fraction of the force of the explosion blasts the outer part of the supernova into an expanding shell of matter that travels through the almost empty space between the stars. As the rapidly moving blast wave encounters the relatively stationary interstellar medium it creates a very narrow, luminous shock front that appears as a faint nebula. Because the shock front is very convoluted the nebulosity appears to be highly structured and the various colours define different energy levels within the interaction.

Though the star responsible for the Vela supernova remnant exploded 12,000 years ago, it is still affecting its environment. The other supernova remnant associated with the explosion is a neutron star, a pulsar, PSR J0835-4510, rotating 11 times a second. It it not in this image, and in any case would be too faint to be seen here.

Credit: Australian Astronomical Observatory, photograph by David Malin.

2010-10-10T02:04:00.002-04:00

Does a Weaker Sun Mean a Warmer Earth?

Imperial College London—The sun has pumped out more warmth recently. The effect on Earth’s climate, however, falls far short of that caused by greenhouse gases, but the increased output suggests that the understanding of solar cycles and their impact on climate needs more work.

2010-10-10T02:03:00.002-04:00

Saturn’s Moons

This montage of images of the Saturnian system was prepared from images taken by the US Voyager 1 spacecraft during its Saturn encounter in November 1980. This artist’s arrangement shows Dione in the foreground, Saturn rising behind, Tethys and Mimas fading in the distance to the right and Enceladus to the left.

Credit: NASA

2010-10-10T02:02:00.002-04:00

Methane in the atmosphere

The German-French climate satellite will measure methane concentrations. This gas contributes to global warming in the same way as carbon dioxide, but its effect is 25 times greater. When it comes to the human-induced increase in quantity in the atmosphere, methane has clearly overtaken carbon dioxide. Since pre-industrial times, the methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled – while the increase in carbon dioxide over the same period has been ‘only’ 30 percent. As with carbon dioxide, methane is one of the gases for which emissions are to be reduced under the Kyoto Protocol.

Credit: NASA

2010-10-07T17:30:00.002-04:00

Testing the relationship between art and environment sculptor, Jason de Caires Taylor created an underwater sculpture garden in Grenada,Canterbury, and in Cancun. Overtime the sculptures will become artificial coral reefs that will house and provide food for tons and tons of sea creatures.

2010-10-07T16:25:00.002-04:00

flickr.com →

Campfire around these parts? Yes pls.

2010-10-07T12:43:00.000-04:00

Conclusive study shows: Alcohol makes you much more likely to believe that the guy that knocked into you in the bar is out to get you

If you’ve ever had one (or 10) too many drinks at a bar, you’re probably familiar with this scenario: a drunk guy stumbles past you, spills a beer all over you, and you get angry. You’re convinced he did it on purpose, and you start fuming. According to a new study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, you’ve probably fallen victim to one of the many side effects of booze: assuming that others’ actions are intentional.

Read the rest after the link..

2010-10-06T03:38:00.001-04:00

Awesome picture of one of my favorites, Buzz Aldrin

2010-10-06T00:21:00.001-04:00

Aurora Over Alaska

Are those green clouds or aurora? Photographed above two weeks ago, puffy green aurora help the Moon illuminate the serene Willow Lake and the snowy Wrangell and Saint Elias Mountains in eastern Alaska, USA. Although auroras might first appear to be moonlit clouds, they only add light to the sky and do not block background stars from view. Called northern lights in the northern hemisphere, auroras are caused by collisions between charged particles from the magnetosphere and air molecules high in the Earth’s atmosphere. If viewed from space, auroras can be seen to glow in X-ray and ultraviolet light as well. Predictable auroras likely occur a few days after a powerful magnetic event has been seen on the Sun.

Credit & Copyright: Paul Aslop

2010-10-05T23:57:00.002-04:00

Going to start making my music recommendation blog/page where I'll probably post relaxing music or just music I listen to for everyone to enjoy. Kind of like "Ken's Infinite Playlist". So for anyone usually wanting me to make them a playlist and I never had the chance to, this is probably a good replacement. In the meantime, continue enjoying the science side of me :>

Here's The link: Ken's Infinite Chill List

Support me <3

2010-10-05T21:12:00.000-04:00

Famous characters of the 80’s collide in this old school illustration by Jeffrey Cruz!

80’s Worlds Collide by Jeffrey ‘CHAMBA’ Cruz / lastscionz (deviantART)