Late Bloomr

buddhainteriors: Alhambra

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:25:19 -0500

Alhambra

free-parking: These color photographs were all taken in the...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:22:47 -0500

These color photographs were all taken in the Russian Empire between 1909 and 1918.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii was a Russian photographer born in 1863. After studying chemistry with Mendeleev and later with Adolf Miethe, Gorskii started developing his own techniques and processes of color photography, giving it a quality that impresses even today.
In 1909, he convinced the Tsar Nicolas II to send him on a trip across the Russian Empire to document its impressive diversity. It was a 10-year project, during which Gorskii took over 10,000 pictures.

The diversity of the people, and the shockingly modern colors of their portraits, make them impossible to forget. They are our contemporaries, now that they stopped hiding between the unfocused black-and-whiteness.

They are almost too present. [via]

"I would define intellectual elegance as a mind that is continually refining itself with education..."

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:18:01 -0500

“I would define intellectual elegance as a mind that is continually refining itself with...

starsaremymuse: Einstein Was Right: Space-Time Is Smooth, Not...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:16:19 -0500

starsaremymuse:

Einstein Was Right: Space-Time Is Smooth, Not Foamy

Space-time is smooth rather than foamy, a new study suggests, scoring a possible victory for Einstein over some quantum theorists who came after him.

In his general theory of relativity, Einstein described space-time as fundamentally smooth, warping only under the strain of energy and matter. Some quantum-theory interpretations disagree, however, viewing space-time as being composed of a froth of minute particles that constantly pop into and out of existence.

It appears Albert Einstein may have been right yet again.

A team of researchers came to this conclusion after tracing the long journey three photons took through intergalactic space. The photons were blasted out by an intense explosion known as a gamma-ray burst about 7 billion light-years from Earth. They finally barreled into the detectors of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009, arriving just a millisecond apart.

Their dead-heat finish strongly supports the Einsteinian view of space-time, researchers said. The wavelengths of gamma-ray burst photons are so small that they should be able to interact with the even tinier “bubbles” in the quantum theorists’ proposed space-time foam.

If this foam indeed exists, the three protons should have been knocked around a bit during their epic voyage. In such a scenario, the chances of all three reaching the Fermi telescope at virtually the same time are very low, researchers said.

So the new study is a strike against the foam’s existence as currently imagined, though not a death blow.

“If foaminess exists at all, we think it must be at a scale far smaller than the Planck length, indicating that other physics might be involved,” study leader Robert Nemiroff, of Michigan Technological University, said in a statement. (The Planck length is an almost inconceivably short distance, about one trillionth of a trillionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom.)

“There is a possibility of a statistical fluke, or that space-time foam interacts with light differently than we imagined,” added Nemiroff, who presented the results Wednesday (Jan. 9) at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif.

If the study holds up, the implications are big, researchers said.

“If future gamma-ray bursts confirm this, we will have learned something very fundamental about our universe,” Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University said in statement.

wetwareontologies: Cells cultured along origami seams, prodded...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:14:59 -0500

wetwareontologies:

Cells cultured along origami seams, prodded to self assemble into 3D shapes. Future applications include organ growth and drug delivery.

mothernaturenetwork: Largest structure in universe discovered...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:14:04 -0500

mothernaturenetwork:

Largest structure in universe discovered

The object is composed of 73 quasars and spans about 1.6 billion light-years in most directions, though it is 4 billion light-years across at its widest point.

discoverynews: Russians Nab First Sample of Lake Vostok Russian...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:14:00 -0500

discoverynews:

Russians Nab First Sample of Lake Vostok

Russian drilling operations at Lake Vostok, Antarctica, have succeeded in collecting a long-sought core sample of water frozen into the borehole from the glacier-covered, 20 million-year-old lake they cracked into last year. Read more…

(This is pure-squeezed awesomejuice.)

propagandery: Kepler Mission Discovers its First Rocky...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 23:11:08 -0500

propagandery:

Kepler Mission Discovers its First Rocky Planet

NASA’s Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system.

…and it has potential for alien life.