Viewing entries in
Science
NOVA shares some of the "hate mail" sent by children to Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, after Pluto was demoted from a planet to a comet. What's interesting about this collection of letters is "how their tone shifted over the years, as the public slowly came to accept Pluto's fall from planethood." EXCLAMATION!
[Via]
Group photo of attendees at the 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference. Seventeen out of the twenty-nine conference attendees were or later became Nobel Prize winners.
Before marrying Emma Wedgwood in 1839, Charles Darwin first logically listed a pros and cons list of marriage.
Using his trademark rationality, Darwin made two columns: “Marry” and “Not Marry.”In the ”Marry” column, he entered things like: “Home and someone to take care of house—Charms of music and female chit-chat. These things good for one’s health.” In the “Not Marry” column was: “Freedom to go where one liked—Choice of Society and little of it. Conversations of clever men at clubs. Not forced to visit relatives, and to bend to every little trifle.”
Kaizar shared this awesome excerpt from a fascinating Vanity Fair article about the new $9 billion gargantuan Large Hadron Collider (That's what she said).
I was repeatedly reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s remark that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” cern may be the closest thing real life has to Hogwarts, an institution where arcane arts amounting to sorcery are pursued by a cultish guild of masters and their young protégés.
An interesting read at Wired: Scientists don't know exactly why, but blue whales are singing in ever deeper voices each year.
Yes Virginia, these are actual patches from NASA missions. Due to licensing problems, the production of the Colbert patch was cut short thus making it a collector's item.
Neat video that captures the up and down of NASA space shuttle's booster rockets. The onboard cameras must be out of this world strong to remain operational during the rough ride. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPQvTgD2quQ&fmt=18]
And if you've ever wondered why a space shuttle rotates during its takeoff, then here's your answer.
[Via]
Boing Boing has a really interesting post on the natural phenomenon of firefly synchronicity. It's pretty awesome, although not quite as awesome as the movie "The Hangover." [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBgq-_NJCl0&fmt=18]
William Castleman snapped this breathtaking time lapse recording of the core of the Milky Way passing over the night sky at the Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, Texas last month. Absolutely stunning! [vimeo=http://vimeo.com/4505537]
The red light actually a neighboring gas cloud, RCW 89, energized into glowing by the fingers of the PSR B1509-58 nebula, astronomers believe.
The scene, which spans 150 light-years, is about 17,000 light years away, so what we see now is how it actually looked 17,000 years ago, and that light is just arriving here.
I said this when I was 8 and I'll say it again: I WANT TO GO TO OUTER SPACE.
You think you had a bad day at work? Try this one. On March 12 a German scientist accidentally "pricked her finger with a needle used to inject the deadly Ebola virus into lab mice." Ebola as we know is some bad shit and has no known cure: "It begins with flu-like symptoms, followed by bloody diarrhea and vomiting. Days later, some victims begin bleeding through the nose, mouth and eyes. Depending on the strain of virus, it can kill up to 90 percent of victims."
An international team of biologists and virologists immediately gathered in a transatlantic teleconference and decided on a course of action. Less than 24 hours after the incident, "an experimental vaccine never before tried on humans was on its way to Germany from a lab in Canada." So far tests suggests that she will survive (fingers crossed), unlike this Russian scientist. Or Karen Wetterhahn, a former chemistry professor at Dartmouth.
Speaking of the movie Outbreak which featured a...wait for it...an outbreak of an Ebola-esque virus, I'd be mad if I was Morgan Freeman.
"A monkey? A goddamn monkey is getting higher billing than me on the movie poster?! I'm MORGAN FREEMAN. I was RED. I'm a fucking GOD. Who's Marcel's agent? Why? Because I should fire YOU and hire that fucking monkey's agent instead."
[Via]
Students from the University of Khartoum scour the Nubian desert in Sudan for remnants of an asteroid, which in a first, was tracked from space to impact.
"It's the first time we've been able to track something through the air and watch it fly apart and then find pieces of it," microbial ecologist Rocco Mancinelli of SETI, a co-author of a study on the meteorite pieces Wednesday in Nature, told Wired.com.
Finding the meteorites was a long shot, but because the rocks would be so important, meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of SETI, lead author of the study, took a bus loaded with 45 students and staff from the University of Khartoum deep into the desert to hunt for them. A 10-hour bus ride and an 18-mile trek through the sand took them to the remote area where scientists thought the rocks, if they existed, would be. The group began sweeping the desert in a line and two hours later the first meteorite was found by a student.
John Huntington explains the crowd's delayed reaction during Garth Brooks' performance of the classic participatory song "Shout" during the President Obama's pre-inauguration. It's more fascinating than it "sounds." [vimeo=http://vimeo.com/2887685]
[Via]
Why hitchhike the galaxy when you can just jump on the ol' tube? Here's a guide to the Milky Way done in the style of a the London subway map.
[Via]
Equals an awesome fireball. Don't try this at home, kids. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGPsBz-Xte8&fmt=18]
[Via]
This is amazing: The Mona Lisa recreated using just 50 semi-transparent polygons.
[Via]
