Science and Exploration

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/500-million-ol...180743101.html


Earliest anthropoid found.

[dreadgeek]

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com....php?ref=fpblg

What I find so fascinating about this is that a consequence of E=mc^2* is as any object with mass approaches the speed of light it becomes more massive requiring every more energy to push it even closer to C**. A black hole is, by necessity, several solar masses (the mass of Sol multiplied by some number N). Supermassive black holes are in the realm of millions to billions of solar masses! So if a tiny sub-atomic particle with mass requires a fantastic amount of energy to get it moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, imagine the kind of energy it takes to get something billions of times more massive than our local star moving at close to the speed of light! That's an unimaginable amount of energy!

* E=mc^2 is energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.
** C is the common shorthand notation for the speed of light.

[femmeInterrupted]

A canyon greater than 800 feet in depth has been discovered on the floor of the Red Sea. The discovery was made by the United Kingdom Royal Navy’s HMS Enterprise using an echo sounder that produces 3D images.

The multi-beam echo sounder equipment used works similarly to sonar. Pulses of sound waves are bounced off the sea floor and then returned back to the instrument on board.
The longer it takes for the sound waves to return to the ship the deeper the seafloor.
This data can then be compiled into an image, like the one shown.

The “Grand Canyon-style” feature may have been created through erosion of ancient rivers prior to the flooding of the Red Sea.
It could also be a newer geological feature; possibly the result of underwater currents scouring the landscape. More likely, it is a combination of the two.

[femmeInterrupted]

Located some 200,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Tucana, Hubble spies an active star forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud -- a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

The star cluster, which is formally designated as NGC 602, is a mere 5 million years young.
The infant stars are still encased in their stellar cocoons, tucked away with the remainder of the gas and dust leftover from their formation.
The intricate ridges that are around the inner brownish portion of the image are the result of erosion, which was caused by the harsh ultraviolet light that is radiating from the energetic baby stars inside, who will eventually eat their way out of their predicament.

This image is a composite, stitched together using several different exposures, each of whic, were made by the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope using several different filters.
Two filters were used to capture broad wavelength ranges. Another was used to sample narrow wavelength emission.

[Hollylane]

Richard III: The twisted bones that reveal a king

Richard III: Facial reconstruction shows king's features

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by femmeInterrupted

[COLOR="Gray"][SIZE="3"][FONT="Palatino Linotype"]Located some 200,000 light-years away, in the constellation of Tucana, Hubble spies an active star forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud -- a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

Wrap your mind around this: when the light of those stars left their points of origin Homo sapiens was just getting its start on this planet. Music, art, religion, all of the things we are accustomed to as culture were still tens of thousand of years in their future. There was no agriculture, no farming, no indication that we buried our dead, no indication that we made music or art, there was certainly no writing. The Hubble Space Telescope is a time machine in that it allows us to, quite literally, look at the universe as it was.

Cheers
Aj

[femmeInterrupted]

I found this fascinating:


Today, we bring you some food for thought about the reality of perception -- not the glass empty or half full debacle, but the sort of perception that seriously impairs us on a cosmological time scale, and biologically too. As we know, due to the finite speed that light travels in a almost-perfect vacuum, we are incapable of seeing things in "real time." We see the moon as it was 1.3 seconds ago, the sun eight minutes ago, Proxima Centauri (the closest star from Earth) as it was more than four years ago, and the Andromeda galaxy (our closest galactic neighbor) as it was more than 2.5 MILLION years ago.

In essence, observing anything in space from our little chunk of rock is surprising, in the sense that simply looking out into the night sky is the closest thing to time travel we currently know of. In the same way, observers in other parts of our galaxy could look at Earth's development over the course of our evolutionary time-line, and they would see the Earth as it appeared hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago (depending on which part of the galaxy they live in and how far away this location is from Earth).

The phenomena of how fast the speed of light is also allows us to study the universe as it appeared mere hundreds of millions of years after the big bang occurred. The most distant sources of light were emitted from the first generation of stars and galaxies in the primordial universe more than 13.7 billion years ago.

Something else that limits our overall perception of the universe is our inability to see light in all of its various wavelengths. Light with properties of both particles and waves (in its various forms) is just like the universe, in that it is an expression of energy. Albeit, an extraordinarily unique expression of it. Most obvious to us is light at optical wavelengths, which is emitted from many stars glittering throughout the universe. Then there is light at ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. Astonishingly, our sun only emits about 44% of its total electromagnetic radiation at optical wavelengths, the rest of it is emitted in other frequencies invisible to the naked eye (but their true nature can be discerned using special tools and filters).

These phenomena are most obvious at large distances, but they are also very applicable to our day to day lives here on Earth, though the effects are not nearly as extreme or noticeable.

I want all of you to stop whatever you are doing for a moment (unless all you are doing is reading this article) and participate in a little experiment with me.

First, close your eyes and extend both of your index fingers. After you've done that, take one of your fingers and touch your nose. With the other finger on the other hand, touch your knee or ankle. Repeat this a few times. (Even better, have a friend do it to you!) After which, you should be able to feel your fingers touching your nose and ankle simultaneously. Think about this for a second...the nerve signal from your ankle had to travel exponentially farther (about twenty times over) to get to your brain than the signal from your nose did, but it *FEELS* simultaneous, doesn't it?

Basically, (and this is trippy) we aren't sure if the ankle and the nose were truly touched at the same time, or if they were touched at slightly different moments, and the brain reassembled asynchronous signals which led to the sensory information being put together at exact same time.

There was actually an experiment done on this very subject where scientists had a group of volunteers press a button that would cause a light to flash after a small delay. After several rounds of this, they found that the volunteers were seeing the flash only milliseconds AFTER they pushed the button, as the brain edited the delay out after it got used to it...suggesting that our brain modifies the sensory information from our bodies in different ways, ways that would typically make more sense to us, causing our consciousness to exist in the past (on a microscale).. kind of like radio stations that operate on a delay of a few seconds to prevent the f-bomb (or something equally scandalous) from being played live on air.

Now, let's tie some of these portions together... if you were to stick your hand straight in front of your face, you will not see a present image of it. Instead, it will be delayed over the course of a few milliseconds due to the constraints of Einstein's theory of special relativity (given the time that it takes light to illuminate your hand, and the biological processes we must undergo before our brain can register stimulus). In addition, we must also factor in the speed of nerves traveling to the visual cortex in the back of our brain, where visual information is sorted through and the "speed of thought," which is largely different form person to person.

In conclusion, many things on a micro and macroscale are directly influenced from our perspective due to a myriad of variables placed on us by the laws of physics and our anatomy itself. There is the reflection and refraction of light scattered in our atmosphere, the observer effect witnessed with subatomic particles, light at various frequencies, and even the properties of time itself, or time dilation more specifically, whose effects can be seen on our satellites in LEO and the event horizons of black holes. All of this bring up an interesting philosophical question... Are we really observing reality, or can we only see into the past--glimpse the world as it was a nanosecond ago?

What are your thoughts?

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...of-perception/

[Corkey]

http://news.yahoo.com/1st-photo-alie...153016924.html

1st photo from ESO in Chile of alien planet being formed.

[dreadgeek]

So some physicists have come up with a new family of solutions for the three-body problem. For those not aware of this problem, it basically is this: Isaac Newton worked out the math to calculate the orbits for any two bodies. However, calculating the orbits of three bodies is fiendishly difficult. In the last few hundred years only three families of solutions were found. The most well-known of these are the Lagrange-Euler family. Most solutions for three bodies in orbit around one another are one-offs but the holy grail is a generalized solution for any three bodies.

Now some physicists have found 13 new families of solutions to the problem.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_2853631.html

Cheers
Aj

[Corkey]

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technolo...lanet-in-past/

Mars rover finds proof life could have thrived on the planet.

[femmeInterrupted]

Astronomers have detected the building blocks of DNA in an interstellar gas cloud located about 25,000 light years from Earth.






http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2013/newchem/

[meridiantoo]

"Scientists working with data from a large particle accelerator in Europe are now almost certain they have pinned down the elusive sub-atomic particle known as the Higgs Boson," NPR's Joe Palca tells our Newscast Desk.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...paign=20130314

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by meridiantoo

"Scientists working with data from a large particle accelerator in Europe are now almost certain they have pinned down the elusive sub-atomic particle known as the Higgs Boson," NPR's Joe Palca tells our Newscast Desk.

Congrats to Peter Higgs on his Nobel Prize for postulating the Higgs boson. This was announced today and thought I'd post a quick follow-up to your post, Corkey.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

So the Voyager 1 probe has reached the absolute outer edge of Sol's influence. Earlier today it was announced that Voyager 1 had left the solar system and had now entered interstellar space but that might be a bit premature. There are still charged particles from the Sun being detected but when the direction of those charged particles change (meaning that they are inbound to the system and not outbound from it) then the probe will truly be in interstellar space.

How far is Voyager 1 from Earth? It is 72 light hours. That means it takes a radio signal, which is just a form of light, 72 hours to travel from the spacecraft to Earth. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second. That's 670,615,200 miles per hour so 48,284,294,400 miles away. Purely for sake of comparison the Moon is 1.5 light seconds away (~250,000 miles) and the Sun is 8 light minutes away (93 million miles).

This is now the farthest out anything made by the hands of humanity has ever been from Earth.

Cheers
Aj

[Ascot]

I heard a story the other day on NPR in which they were discussing a book titled Frankencat, about some of the different genetic modifications that are being performed on animals. Specifically, the story was about how spider DNA has been introduced into goats so that when the goat's milk is purified, it contains a significant amount of silk that can be harvested and used in any number of applications. Because silk is super light but very strong, it's being looked at for use in things like bullet proof vests, etc.

[Corkey]

Originally Posted by AscotButch

I heard a story the other day on NPR in which they were discussing a book titled Frankencat, about some of the different genetic modifications that are being performed on animals. Specifically, the story was about how spider DNA has been introduced into goats so that when the goat's milk is purified, it contains a significant amount of silk that can be harvested and used in any number of applications. Because silk is super light but very strong, it's being looked at for use in things like bullet proof vests, etc.

I had to google to get the right book.
http://www.npr.org/books/titles/1735...ave-new-beasts

[Little Fish]

Originally Posted by AscotButch

I heard a story the other day on NPR in which they were discussing a book titled Frankencat, about some of the different genetic modifications that are being performed on animals. Specifically, the story was about how spider DNA has been introduced into goats so that when the goat's milk is purified, it contains a significant amount of silk that can be harvested and used in any number of applications. Because silk is super light but very strong, it's being looked at for use in things like bullet proof vests, etc.

This reminds me of when I took Molecular Genetics in college. The scientist who taught discussed how their exists a fish whose blood contains a distinct "anti-freeze" gene. (I'm unclear how it is used originally by the fish.) This anti-freeze gene has since been isolated from the fish, reproduced in a laboratory and ultimately transferred into the genome of a strawberry. The idea was to prevent strawberry crop loss from untimely freezing etc. I'm sure there are people who scoff and otherwise flip out about this but honestly, I think that shit is bitchin' !

[dreadgeek]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_2957362.html

There's a new kind of supernova that's been discovered this one when a white dwarf explodes (which, honestly, I didn't think they had the mass to do).

Also there's a storm on Venus that has been going on for six years. That's nothing compared to the hurricane that is the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. That storm has been going on since at least the 1600s when Cassini first observed it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...tml?ref=topbar

[Ascot]

It's quite something to think about a storm that's been raging for centuries. I wonder what causes something to become classified as a storm vs. simply being considered an atmospheric condition. Is it that it's different than on most of the rest of the planet?