Gotta admit, this would have been one hell of a bash. The January 1978 cover of Pizazz is a winner on so many levels. Click through to see the whole thing, including other 1970s television icons.
Most of these characters are familiar to me seeing as I, ahem, grew up in the 70s. But why ruin the fun. How many can you name?
[Via Retronaut]
Catching a glimpse of a hummingbird in flight is rare enough as it is — but imagine stumbling upon one of its nests!
"Here is a hummingbird nest my wife found," wrote the Redditor who posted the photo online yesterday. "I don't think I've ever seen one before."
Hummingbirds construct their nests out of seeds, feathers, moss, fibers from leaves, spider silk, and other materials.
Now imagine what the chicks will look like when they hatch!
[Via Huffington Post]
A strange thing happens to satellites when they’re in the Moon’s orbit. When passing over certain craters, they’ve been known to suddenly change course and plummet towards the surface before pulling back up. Scientists now know how these gravitational anomalies formed.
These craters are called mass concentrations, or mascons for short — impact basins that exhibit unexpectedly strong gravitational pull. Scientists have theorized that these craters must contain extra mass. But why this should be the case has remained somewhat of a mystery.
Now, using high-resolution gravity data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) missions, researchers discovered that mascons have gravitational fields that resemble a bull’s eye pattern: a center of strong gravity surrounded by alternating rings of weak and strong gravity. MIT’s Jennifer Chu explains:
To figure out what caused this gravitational pattern, the team created simulations of lunar impacts, along with their geological repercussions in the moon’s crust and mantle, over both the short- and long-term. They found that the simulations reproduced the bull’s-eye pattern under just one scenario.
When an asteroid crashes into the moon, it sends material flying out, creating a dense band of debris around the crater’s perimeter. The impact sends a shockwave through the moon’s interior, reverberating within the crust and producing a counterwave that draws dense material from the lunar mantle toward the surface, creating a dense center within the crater. After hundreds of millions of years, the surface cools and relaxes, creating a bull’s-eye that matches today’s gravitational pattern.
These patterns, therefore, are the result of crater excavation, collapse and cooling following an impact event. The subsequent increase in density and gravitational pull at a mascon's bulls-eye is caused by lunar material melted by the heat of an asteroid impact.
We knew that a trip to Mars would expose astronauts to excessive amounts of radiation, but new data from Curiosity's Mars Science Laboratory is showing that it's worse than we thought.
According to a new NASA study, Martian-bound astronauts would be bombarded with as much cosmic radiation as they’d get from a full-body CT scan about once a week for a year.
This means that a round-trip voyage to the Red Planet would blast astronauts with two-thirds of allowable lifetime exposure. What’s worse, NASA’s study did not take into account the time that would be spent on the Martian surface — added time that would undoubtedly result in levels reaching a full lifetime’s worth of acceptable radiation exposure.
This assumes, of course, that special measures would not be taken to protect the travelers, such as radiation shielding and special suits — technologies that don't quite exist. At least not yet.
The space agency came to this conclusion after reviewing measurements made aboard one of Curiosity's instruments during its 253 day journey to Mars. The results were published on Thursday in the journal Science.
The Guardian reports:
Missions to the Red Planet would take several years to complete and, during that time, astronauts would face health risks from two main types of radiation: cosmic rays and energetic particles from the sun, associated with solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Both types of radiation can damage DNA and increase the risk of an astronaut developing cancer.
On missions in low-Earth orbit, which include all shuttle flights and stays on the International Space Station, astronauts are largely protected from the most harmful effects of the radiation thanks to the Earth's magnetic field, which creates a bubble around the planet that deflects much of the radiation. In interplanetary space, however, astronauts will not have this protection.
Nasa's guidelines say that astronauts should not be exposed to more than 1,000 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation in a lifetime, which is associated with a 5% increase in risk of developing a fatal cancer. According to the latest study, based on data from MSL's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD), astronauts on a 360-day round trip to Mars would get a dose of 662mSv on their journey.
Space.com has produced this awesome infographic explaning more (click the expand button at bottom right):
Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
Microscopy is advancing in leaps and bounds these days. It was just last week that scientists produced the first image of a hydrogen atom’s orbital structure
Holy crap, is it incredible when scientists present actual, tangible visual evidence to reaffirm theoretical models. As any chemistry student knows, molecular bonds, or covalent bond structures, are typically represented in science class with a stick-like nomenclature. But as the work of Felix Fischer, Dimas de Oteyza and their Berkeley Lab colleagues beautifully demonstrates, these models are startlingly accurate.
And like so many good scientific discoveries, it all happened somewhat by accident.
The Berkeley scientists were actually working on a way to precisely assemble nanostructures made from graphene using a new cutting-edge approach to chemical reactions. They were trying to build a single-layer material in which carbon atoms are arranged in repeating, hexagonal patterns — but they needed to take a closer look to see what was happening at the single-atom level. So, they pulled out a powerful atomic force microscope — and what they saw was “amazing,” to quote Fischer.
In this image you can see the positions of individual atoms and bonds in a molecule having 26 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms structured as three connected benzene rings.
Specifically, they managed to capture the specific outcomes of the reactions themselves — a totally unexpected and happy consequence of the research.
“Nobody has ever taken direct, single-bond-resolved images of individual molecules, right before and immediately after a complex organic reaction,” Fischer noted through a release.
To create the image, the researchers used the fine tip of the non-contact atomic force microscope to “feel” or read the electrical forces produced by the molecules. Each time the tip moved near a molecule’s surface, it was deflected by the different charges. The resulting movements of the stylus were detected by a laser beam, which in turn provided the data required to produce an image of how the atoms and bonds were aligned. What’s more, they were also able to visualize the bonds between them.
Taking a look at the top image, you can see the original molecule at left before the reaction takes place. At right, the two most common final products of the reaction are shown. The clumps are about a billionth of a meter across (3 angstroms).
You can read the entire study at the journal Science: “Direct Imaging of Covalent Bond Structure in Single-Molecule Chemical Reactions.”
Images: Berkeley Labs.
A recent study has shown that narcissistic men — guys who have an exaggerated sense of entitlement and an unrealistically positive self-image — are considered sexier by women. At least in the short-term.
To demonstrate this, German psychologist Michael Dufner performed a rather interesting experiment. He recruited 61 male heterosexual men and paid them 35 euros to approach at least 25 women they would “genuinely like to know” and ask them for their contact information.
Prior to this, the men were assessed for their narcissistic tendencies. Now, to be clear, the researchers did not include guys with full-on narcissistic personality disorder. These were, for the most part, ordinary men — each of whom exhibited varying degrees of narcissism.
In addition, the women were asked to rate the man’s appeal by stating whether they liked the man, being chatted up by him, and felt attracted to him. Undergrads were recruited to assess each man’s physical attractiveness. The researchers also watched the exchanges take place to rate the social boldness of each encounter.
HealthDay reporter Kathleen Doheny tells us what happened:
On average, the men approached about 23 women. To rule out the possibility that the more narcissistic men were more selective in who they approached, the researchers analyzed each woman who was approached on her physical attractiveness and manner of dress. The narcissists weren't more selective.
The narcissistic guys did get the girl more often. The higher the level of narcissism, the more likely they were to get more contacts.
"The effect was not due to high self-esteem, but indeed the narcissism," Dufner said. The physical attractiveness and social boldness of the narcissists were the two likely reasons for their appeal to women, he said.
What’s more, the higher their narcissistic admiration, the more appealing the women found them to be.
Psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne offers her perspective on the study:
The “correlation does not equal causation” alarm must surely be going off in your head. It’s impossible to tell whether the charming narcissists were charming because they’re attractive or charming because they’re socially bold. Does attractiveness create a psychological environment in which narcissism flourishes or do narcissists only seem attractive because they value looking good? In terms of a theoretical explanation for the attractiveness-narcissism link, the authors discuss the possibility that short-term mating success might be good for the species, making the findings consistent with evolutionary theory. Similarly, the socially bold may be the evolutionarily more successful. These interpretations may account for short-term mating success, but not for the cohesiveness of the family unit, which would seem like an important evolutionary consideration as well.
In either case, the upshot of the study is clear. Beware the lure of the handsome (or beautiful) charmer who not only makes good eye candy but also swaggers with perhaps a bit too much self-assurance. This person may be a great first date but, over time, an inability to establish close intimate bonds will only bring you sorrow. Long-term relationship fulfillment requires the emotional substance of someone who is not just socially bold, but socially caring.
There’s actually a ton more to this study, which included two other parts. It turns out that men are likewise attracted to narcissistic women, so this isn’t just a girl-on-guy thing.
Read more analysis here and here. Or read the entire study at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin: “Are Narcissists Sexy? Zeroing in on the Effect of Narcissism on Short-Term Mate Appeal.”
For something that was developed in the early 1970s, the now-defunct supersonic Concorde jet was the most futuristic-looking airliner the world had ever seen. Until now, that is.
This unmanned prototype of a supersonic airplane — a plane which can travel faster than the speed of sound — was unveiled to the media in Utsunomiya, Japan last week. The plane is being developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Fuji Heavy Industries Inc.
The prototype, which weighs a ton and measures eight meters in length, will go through a series of flight tests later this year in Sweden.
A major drawback of the original supersonic jet, the Concorde, was that it was ridiculously loud. But this one is being designed to feature significant noise reduction effects. If a passenger jet for up to 50 people is built with the same technology, it could be about 75% quieter than the Concorde.
[Source: Japan News]
An earlier version of this article stated that the new supersonic jet would be 25% quieter than the Concorde. The correct figure is 75% quieter.
Thanks, now corrected.
Called LARES, this tiny — but remarkably heavy — satellite both looks and acts like a disco ball. By bouncing lasers off its reflectors, Italian researchers are hoping to prove Einstein’s conjecture that the Earth warps space-time as it rotates.
One important aspect of general relativity is an effect called rotational-frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. Einstein said that the rotation of a sufficiently massive object would distort space and time, thus dragging a nearby object out of position (a phenomenon known as precess) in a way that would overrule the much simpler math posited by classical Newtonian physics.
But capturing the effects of rotational-frame dragging has proven exceedingly difficult; the effect is incredibly minute — about one part in a few trillion. The only way to measure it is to look at something massive, like a black hole, or create a super sensitive device and put it into orbit.
And this is exactly what ESA scientists Antonio Paolozzi and Ignazio Ciufolini have done by virtue of LARES, the Laser Relativity Satellite. It’s a soccer ball-sized tungsten sphere with no thrusters or electronic components. LARES is covered with 92 reflectors which will allow it to be tracked by lasers on Earth.
Now, despite its small size, this thing weighs 882 pounds (400 kg). And in fact, it’s the first aerospace structure ever made from tungsten alloy — and it’s the densest object orbiting anything in the solar system. Its mass, therefore, should create the noticeable precess effect the scientists are looking for. By tracking LARES’s position with the lasers, and then carefully measuring how it moves, the scientists are hoping to see evidence of frame-dragging.
And to compensate for other potential effects, measurements will be supplemented with those from the LAGEO and LAGEO 2 satellites, two other reflective satellites launched earlier.
LARES was launched into space on February 13th, 2012.
Check out the entire report: “LARES successfully launched in orbit: satellite and mission description.”
Top image: ESA; frame-dragging graphic Annie Rosen.
The Second World War witnessed the introduction of hundreds of cutting-edge and often bizarre weapons, many of which became quite famous. But there were plenty of others that never got the same kind of notoriety. Here are 11 weapons from WWII you probably never knew existed.
Before we get started, it’s worth noting that all of the weapons listed here were put into action during the war. There were a ton of crazy and highly conceptual weapons that were considered, but never deployed. These ones, on the other hand, were actually put to use.
Like the V1 cruise missile and the V2 rocket that preceded it, the Vergeltungswaffe 3 Cannon (a.k.a. “England Cannon”) was another so-called Nazi "vengeance weapon.” It was a massive super gun built directly into a hill and capable of firing artillery shells across the English Channel from France to London. The V3 operated according to a multi-charge principle in which secondary propellant charges were fired to progressively accelerate the projectile as it moved along the barrel of the cannon. During trials in May 1944, the V3 achieved a range of up to 55 miles (88 km), and tests in July 1944 saw shells reach a distance of 58 miles (93 km).
Of the two V3s built, only the secondary gun saw action. From January 11 to February 22, 1945, some 183 rounds were fired. It’s target was the recently liberated city of Luxembourg. But it proved to be largely ineffectual; of the 142 rounds that landed, the V3 took the lives of only 10 people, wounding another 35.
Speaking of big guns — and the Nazis clearly had a thing for big guns — these two 31.5-inch caliber German cannons were absolute behemoths. And in fact, they are the largest cannons the world has ever seen. Each of them had to be transported in several pieces, assembled, and then mounted on a prepared emplacement — a procedure that required around 4,000 men! The Nazis deployed an entire anti-aircraft regiment to protect them, along with special troops to guard against partisan attacks.
Of the two, only Gustav was put into active service. It fired 42 shots during the 1942 siege of Sebastopol — and the penetrative power of its huge shells, each weighing 11,000 pounds (4,800 kg), was enough to destroy an ammunitions dump protected by 100 feet (30 m) of rock. There were plans to equip it with rocket-propelled shells that could reach targets as far as 90 miles (145 km) away. Weapons expert Alexander Ludeke refers to them as “technological masterpieces” but says they were “basically a waste of materials, technological expertise, and manpower.”
After the fall of France, Winston Churchill vowed to “set Europe ablaze.” To that end, British secret agents were equipped with an assortment of disguised explosive devices that would have made even James Bond jealous — bombs that were made to look like soap, shoes, bottles of chianti, bicycle pumps, suitcases — and even rats.
The Guardian explains how the exploding rats were used — both intentionally and unintentionally:
But the most exotic device was the "explosive rat". A hundred of the rodents were procured by an SOE officer posing as a student needing them for laboratory experiments. The rats were skinned, filled with plastic explosive, and sewn up. The idea was to place a rat among coal beside a boiler. When they were spotted, they would immediately be thrown on to the fire, causing a huge explosion.
That was the theory. As one of the SOE files records: "This device caused considerable trouble to the enemy, but not quite in the way that was intended." The Germans intercepted the container of dead rats before they could be used for "operational purposes". But all was not lost. According to an SOE report, their discovery had an "extraordinary moral effect": the rodents were exhibited at all German military schools, prompting a hunt for "hundreds of rats the enemy believed were distributed on the continent".
SOE concluded: "The trouble caused to them was a much greater success to us than if the rats had actually been used."
Looking to refine the power of the Kamikaze attack, the Japanese introduced the Ohka in September 1944 — a large piloted bomb.
It was a rocket-propelled aircraft designed specifically for Kamikaze attacks and was equipped with a 2,643 pound warhead. During an attack, the Ohka was carried under the fuselage of a Mitsubishi G4M until its target was within range. Once released, a pilot would glide as close to the target as possible, hit the rocket engines, and then bullet towards the ship at a horrendous speed. The Allies quickly learned to attack the Ohka carrier aircraft before it had a chance to release it, greatly diminishing its effectiveness. But on at least one occasion it sunk a U.S. destroyer. [Image]
As the Russians were being overwhelmed on the Eastern Front by the Wehrmacht, the Red Army took to desperate measures — including the use of the so-called anti-tank dog. Initially, these dogs were trained to carry a bomb to a specific target, release the device with its teeth, and then return to its operator. Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible to get the dogs to do this, so the Soviets relied on much simpler strategy: just blow up the dog.
These suicide dogs were taught that food awaits them at the bottom of tanks. So, with a 26-pound bomb strapped on — and with the dogs deliberately kept hungry — they would desperately run to their targets in search of food, unaware of their eventual fate. A lever attached to the rig would strike the bottom of the tank as the dog dived under, causing the bomb to detonate. The dogs became so effective that some Germans began shooting any dog on sight. The Soviets used about 40,000 dogs for various army tasks, and an undocumented estimate places the number of German tanks destroyed at about 300.
In preparation for D-Day, the Allies developed a host of unusual vehicles, many of which were named after warfare expert Percy Hobart. Here’s a sampling:
The Sherman Crab
AVRE Bobbin
AVRE Bridgelayer
Dubbed Fritz-X, this was an air-launched German radio-controlled bomb. Its primary function was to destroy heavily armored naval targets. It was based on the standard SD 1400 armor-piercing bomb, but it featured superior aerodynamics, four small wings extending 4.4 feet (1.35 m) across, and a tail. But to drop the thing, a gunner had to fly directly over the intended target, thus leaving him tremendously exposed.
It proved to be a formidable weapon, however — one that gave the Allies fits. On September 9, 1943, soon after the Italian truce, the Germans dropped several of them on the battleship Roma, sinking it with 1,455 men on board. It was also used to sink the British Cruiser HMS Spartan, the British destroyer HMS Janus, and the Newfoundland hospital ship. It also damaged many other ships. Over 2,000 Fritz-Xs were built, but only 200 were ever dropped. Part of the problem was the bombs could not change direction abruptly, exposing the bomber groups who suffered heavy losses. [Image: bocn.co.uk]
This radio-controlled glide bomb was the most effective guided weapon of the war — a bomb that destroyed numerous destroyers and trading ships. After being released by a German carrier aircraft, its rocket would fire for about 10 seconds, and then glide to its target for the rest of the way. It even featured a light installation at its rear so that the gunner could easily observe it, either at night or day. It was first deployed in August 1943, and is responsible for sinking the British corvette HMS Egret. Toward the end of the war, the Allies figured out how to tap into its radio frequencies, allowing them to interfere with the device and greatly reduce its effectiveness.
This is one of those ideas that looked good on paper, but proved awful in practice. A British innovation, the Unrotated Projectile was a short range rocket-firing anti-aircraft weapon with wires and parachutes attached. The idea was to create an aerial minefield. As these rockets slowly drifted back down, any aircraft flying through the deployment area would be a risk of snagging a cable which would pull the rocket towards it and detonate on impact. Trouble is, a slight change of wind could cause the rockets to drift back onto the ship that launched them. Despite this, it was used extensively during the early days of World War II.
Originally an Italian innovation, these tiny four-man British subs could reach distances of 1,200 miles, dive to a depth of 300 feet, and travel at a speed of 6 knots. Each mini-sub displaced about 30 tonnes of water when submerged. It only had one access hatch, which proved to be a major headache during emergencies.
Military Factory explains how it worked:
The desired method of operation concerning the X-craft was to position the submarine as close to the target using one of two delivery systems developed: the boat could be either towed by a conventional submarine to be suspended underneath the target enemy ship or launched from the deck of a submarine to make its way to the target ship under its own power. The Admiralty chose two 3,570 lb conjoined mines of a high explosive nature to be attached to the sides of the boat via a bolt. These mines were then released by way of a hand crank when the vessel was positioned below the hull of an enemy ship. The explosive was equipped with a delayed fuse timer that allowed the boat to retire out of the blast area within time. The explosive used was Amatex, a standard and stable military explosive comprised of 51% ammonium nitrate, 40% TNT, and 9% RDX.
Dubbed “doodlebugs” by the Allies, the Goliath was a remote-controlled demolition carrier.
It was introduced by the Germans in 1942 who used the device to transport a 165 pound bomb to a target, which typically included tanks, dense infantry formations, bridges, and buildings. These vehicles were wire-controlled and exploded on impact with their targets. Over 4,600 of these devices were produced, including a larger version that could carry a 220 pound bomb. Unfortunately for the Germans, they were slow, hard to control, and the payloads far too small. The idea was clearly ahead of its time — a kind of precursor to modern robots — but the technology was simply not advanced enough.
Thanks!
Instead of listening for radio signals, a group of astronomers is proposing that we search for extraterrestrials by detecting their planet’s exaggerated heat signatures — signatures that could be detected in the infrared. But to do so, we’d have to build the largest telescope this world has ever seen.
Writing in Astronomy Magazine, a team of astronomers, engineers, and physicists from the University of Hawaii, the University of Freiburg, and elsewhere is making the case for infrared SETI. The basic idea is that a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization will produce more power on its planet than it receives from its parent star. This delta in energy could indicate the presence of an alien civilization.
"The energy footprint of life and civilization appears as infrared heat radiation," says Jeff Kuhn, the project's lead scientist. "A convenient way to describe the strength of this signal is in terms of total stellar power that is incident on the host planet."
Thus, given a large enough telescope — and one that’s designed specifically for infrared detection — astronomers could scan the heavens for planets within a 60 light-year radius.
And indeed, there is already a proposal on the table for one such telescope: The Colossus.
Space Daily describes the telescope:
The quest for direct infrared detection of extraterrestrial civilizations, along with many other research possibilities, has led the team to the funding and building of a giant telescope. Currently planned large infrared telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope, and the European Extremely Large Telescope, would not be large enough.
Instead, a telescope (dubbed Colossus) with a primary mirror about 250 feet (77 meters) in diameter could find hundreds of Earth-sized or larger planets in habitable zones, and perhaps dozens of extraterrestrial civilizations, by using a sensitive coronagraph — and the technology to build such an instrument exists.
The international team thus seeks funding to build a 77-m telescope, which would be constructed from revolutionary thin-mirror slumping and polishing technologies developed by the Innovative Optics team. The telescope would consist of approximately sixty 8-m mirror segments, and would operate at a high-altitude site.
In addition, the telescope could be used to study stellar surfaces, black holes, and quasars.
Read the entire report at Astronomy: “How to find ET with infrared light.”
Image by NASA/JPL. Telescope via Innovative Optics.
In preparation for the upcoming Global Futures 2045 conference, the New York Times has put together a quick preview, including a biopic of its ambitious founder, the Russian entrepreneur and 'immortalist,' Dmitry Itskov.
Armed with the tagline, "Towards a new strategy for human evolution," GF2045 will be taking place in New York City during the weekend of June 15-16 — and I'll be there covering it for io9.
The list of speakers include futurist Ray Kurzweil, biologist George Church, mathematician Roger Penrose, mind theorist Marvin Minsky, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, and many, many others.
The congress is the brainchild of Dmitry Itskov, a 32-year-old businessman who foresees the day when we'll be able to produce lifelike, low-cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of the human brain — including all the particulars of consciousness and personality.
David Segal writes:
At the age of 25, he started to have the symptoms of a midlife crisis. He anticipated the regrets he might have as an old man — the musical instruments unlearned, the books unread. The standard span of 80 or so years suddenly seemed woefully inadequate. He soon was seeking out leaders from almost every religion, in a search for purpose and peace.
The more he contemplated the world, the more broken it seemed.
“Look at this,” he said, opening his laptop on the table and starting a slide show with one heartbreaking statistic after another: Almost one billion people are now starving. Forty-nine countries are currently involved in military conflict. Ten percent of people are disabled. And so on.
“That is the picture of this world that we created, with the minds we have today, with our set of values, with our egotism, our selfishness, our aggression,” he went on. “Most of the world is suffering. What we’re doing here does not look like the behavior of grown-ups. We’re killing the planet and killing ourselves.”
TO change that picture, he reasons, we must change our minds, or give them a chance to “evolve,” to use one of his favorite words. Before our minds can evolve, though, we need a new paradigm of what it means to be human. That requires a transition to a world where most people aren’t consumed by the basic questions of survival.
Hence, avatars. They may sound like an improbable way to solve the real problems on Mr. Itskov’s laptop, or like the perfect gift for the superrich of the future. But the laws of supply and demand abide in Mr. Itskov’s utopia, and he assumes that once production of avatars is ramped up, costs will plunge. He also assumes that charities now devoted to feeding, clothing and healing the poor will focus on the goal of making and distributing affordable bodies, which in this case means machines.
Read the entire article at the New York Times.
Three years ago, something rather cataclysmic happened to this asteroid. Whatever it was — and it was probably a collision with a smaller asteroid — has now resulted in an exceptionally long debris tail that just keeps getting longer.
Asteroids aren’t supposed to have tails. That’s comet territory. But this object, called P/2010 A2 (LINEAR), is leaking a dust trail of a kind never seen before by astronomers.
Just to put this length into perspective, a million-kilometers is roughly three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. That’s a long distance — and a lot of debris. Observations indicate that the tail consists of chunks about one centimeter across or smaller.
The asteroid itself is about 100 meters across, and it’s located near the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
So what caused this? Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy offers two possible explanations:
One possible explanation for this bizarre object is that the rock was hit by another smaller asteroid, an impact that would’ve had the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon, disrupting the asteroid and blasting out thousands of tons of dust. Another possible cause is a subtle process called the YORP effect, where the very gentle pressure of sunlight spun up the asteroid, increasing its rotation until it broke apart.
If Plait’s second explanation is correct, the asteroid is of a very rare class that ejects dust in a comet-like fashion.
This object was originally discovered in 2010 when astronomers detected a strange X-shaped debris pattern and long streamers of dust.
The Wisconsin Indiana Yale Observatory adds some more insight:
Since the earth orbits in the same plane as this debris, we observe a line, or tail-like structure. In time these particles, under the gravitational pull of the sun, will form a meteor stream surrounding the sun. Meteor streams are what we see as "shooting stars" when the earth ploughs through the stream of debris.
In addition, debris from events like these contribute to the dust cloud (called zodiacal dust) that is spread out over our Solar System.
Images: WIYN, Hubble.
Twitter has compiled a series of maps showing geo-located Tweet volumes since 2009. The resulting maps are intricate, gorgeous — and even a bit revealing.
According to Miguel Rios, Twitter's Visual Insights Manager, billions of tweets were used to put these maps together. Every dot is a tweet, and the colors represent tweet volume.
What's particularly fascinating is how the coastlines and transportation conduits — including those on the ocean — are so clearly demarcated. It's also interesting to see those regions that are either low density, inaccessible — or even off the grid. There may also be selectional effects at play here as the maps were compiled exclusively from geotags; population density does not necessarily correlate to tweet density. Nor is twitter used to the same degree in different parts of the world.
Europe
North America
San Francisco
New York City
Tokyo
Seattle
Boston
Moscow
Seoul
More at Twitter's Flickr site.
Good news, everyone! We’re not intergalactic hicks after all! Turns out that our solar system is located in a large spiral branch called the Local Arm, a prominent feature of the Milky Way galaxy.
Top image: The left side shows what we used to think the Milky Way looked like, the right side shows the recently updated version. Image credit: Robert Hurt, IPAC; Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF.
Astronomers have speculated that our solar system is situated in a kind of short “spur” — a minor offshoot located between the galaxy’s two long spiral arms, the Perseus Arm and the Sagittarius Arm. And indeed, given that we’re located within the Milky Way itself, astronomers have had a hard time painting an accurate picture of what our galaxy actually looks like. It's been 150 years since Stephen Alexander first suggested that the Milky Way is a spiral — but no consensus exists on the exact nature of its spiral arms.
But now, by using a technique called the trigonometric parallax method, a team of astronomers led by Xu Ye have been able to get a better sense of our location relative to other stars. The technique works by using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) to measure changes in our position as seen from opposite ends of Earth’s orbit (i.e. measurements made in June and December from 2008 to 2012). The array consists of 10 radio telescopes spread throughout the United States, Hawaii, and the Virgin Islands.
When combined with other historical data, these parallax measurements allowed the astronomers to study the distribution and 3-dimensional motions of star forming regions in the spiral arm over the entire northern sky.
“Our results suggest that the Local arm does not have the large pitch angle characteristic of a short spur,” they write in the study. “Instead its active star formation...suggest that it is more like the adjacent Perseus and Sagittarius arms; perhaps it is a branch of one of these arms.”
They note that it could also be a bifurcation of the Carina-Sagittarius arm, or an independent arm segment altogether.
Contrary to previous results, the astronomers now believe that the Local arm is closer to the Perseus than to the Sagittarius arm, suggesting that a branching from the former may be more likely.
As for the Local arm itself, our neighbourhood is about 5 kpc in length (16,308 light-years) and about 1 kpc in width (3,261 light-years).
Movin' on up!
You can read a preprint of the article: “On the Nature of the Local Spiral Arm of the Milky Way.” The paper is scheduled to appear in the upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal.
Yes. Yes, that's exactly right.
Working under the assumption that silkworms are nature’s original 3D printers, researchers at MIT Media Lab's Mediated Matter group have created a domed sculpture from silk fibres woven by a robotic arm — which was then completed by over 6,500 silkworms.
The finished project is called the Silk Pavilion, an effort to explore “the relationship between digital and biological fabrication in design.” The researchers hope to leverage their findings into designing 3D fabrication techniques that are more in line with organic, natural processes.
To create the dome, the researchers programmed a robotic arm to imitate the way silkworms move and deposit silk when building their cocoons. The bot then laid down one kilometre’s worth of silk fibre across flat polygonal metal frames to create 26 panels. These frames were then used to create the dome, which was suspended from the ceiling.
And then the fun began: Some 6,500 live silkworms were individually placed on the dome, where they deposited their silk and completed the structure.
The silkworms were removed prior to metamorphosis; it's estimated that eggs laid during the reproduction cycle could have produced an additional 250 pavilions.
I highly encourage you to watch this video so you can see the silkworms in all their creepy-crawly glory.
All images via MIT Media Lab's Mediated Matter group.
[Via Animal New York]
Wow, is this a taste of the future, or what? Check out MindWalker — an exoskeleton that will soon enable paralysed and locked-in people to walk using only their mind. Ah, who are we kidding — we're ALL going to eventually want this for ourselves!
The groundbreaking device, which is currently under review by the European Commission, consists of three main elements: The exoskeleton itself, a virtual-reality user interface, and the mind-reading component. It was developed by a consortium of several major universities and companies.
Users control the MindWalker using an EEG cap that measures electrical activity at various points across the scalp. There are a number of different ways to control the exoskeleton in this way, but the best model involves wearing a pair of glasses with flickering diodes attached to each lens.
New Scientist's Helen Thomson explains:
Each set of diodes flashes at a different frequency in the wearer's peripheral vision. The light is processed by an area of the brain called the occipital cortex. Measurements from this part of the brain can detect whether [Thomas Hoellinger of the Free University of Brussels] is concentrating on the left diode or the right. He shows me how concentrating on the left starts the exoskeleton walking, while concentrating on the right stops it. All this happens in under a second.
Frustratingly, the exoskeleton often generates electrical noise which interferes with the EEG signal, making it unreadable. But the developers have a temporary fix:
So instead of mind control, [paralyzed patient Antonio] Melillo is walking by moving his upper body. As he leans left, a pressure sensor just above his buttock registers the movement and moves the opposite leg of the exoskeleton. He repeats the process on the other side to begin walking. "It's great, such an amazing sensation," he says. "Not just walking but even being able to stand upright."
Two days after my visit, the team identified flickering frequencies that are less affected by the mechanical noise and filmed a researcher controlling the exoskeleton with his mind alone.
Image: MINDWALKER Consortium.
Looking ahead, the developers hope to create a lightweight version that can be incorporated into a pair of pants. They’re also hoping to find a more elegant solution to replace the clunky glasses and the flashing diodes.
More at New Scientist — including a very cool video where you can see both techniques being used.
Images: New Scientist.