Science anyone?

Ask Ethan #45: How deep does the Multiverse go?

"Which ideas are likely, which ones are speculative, and which ones are pure fiction?"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw

Every single point you see in this video is a galaxy, containing anywhere from many millions to trillions of stars; the largest among them are thousands of times the mass of our Milky Way. And still, this amazing flight through the Universe, above, only shows us somewhere around 0.0002% of the galaxies visible to us in our Universe!

By looking at an unremarkable, small patch of sky that doesn’t appear to have any remarkable features in it?—?no bright stars, no nearby galaxies, no dust or neutral gas clouds?—?and pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at it for a total of 23 days worth of time, we were able to discover over 5,000 galaxies present in the distant Universe. Since it would have taken 32 million of these regions to cover the entire sky, we know there are at least hundreds of billions of galaxies in our Universe today.

Squishy robots - Phase-changing material could allow even low-cost robots to switch between hard and soft states.

In the movie “Terminator 2,” the shape-shifting T-1000 robot morphs into a liquid state to squeeze through tight spaces or to repair itself when harmed.

Now a phase-changing material built from wax and foam, and capable of switching between hard and soft states, could allow even low-cost robots to perform the same feat.

The material — developed by Anette Hosoi, a professor of mechanical engineering and applied mathematics at MIT, and her former graduate student Nadia Cheng, alongside researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization and Stony Brook University — could be used to build deformable surgical robots. The robots could move through the body to reach a particular point without damaging any of the organs or vessels along the way.

Robots built from the material, which is described in a new paper in the journal Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, could also be used in search-and-rescue operations to squeeze through rubble looking for survivors, Hosoi says.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aozu2C9Kmlg

How NASA Would Have Handled a Failed Apollo 11

This weekend marks the 45 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission landing the first men on the moon. Like all missions, NASA had a contingency plan. Space historian Amy Shira Teitel explains the astronauts' grim orders if a lunar lander malfunction had left Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stranded on the moon.

Animusic, founded by Wayne Lytle of N.Y, is an American based company specializing in the 3D visualization of MIDI-based music. Sent to me by a board member, I simply had to share this entertaining video with you. I am sure there is 'science' in there. 🙂
Swan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF26jtMA9U0

I am sure there is 'science' in there. 🙂

Absolutely swan, it is pure science. I look at music as being a type of irrational math that a computer through intense emulation cant simulate, but not exactly reproduce, analog music. The visualization comes from a computer, which is pure math.

Edit: Yeah, a computer can simulate reality to the point that it is unrecognizably different from reality, but it will never truely be a quantum system with infinite states. A Turing Machine is a math based machine, and all you need to do is compare your math skills to a computer to see that Turing machines will never be synthetically conscious - Turing machines are essentially different than how a Mother-Earth brain works.

Colors of the Innermost Planet A MUST SEE.

This colorful view of Mercury was produced by using images from the color base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER's primary mission. These colors are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colors enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up Mercury's surface.

Good evening everyone,

Question time:
Swan

The Bald Eagle is our National Bird. Why did Benjamin Franklin - who wanted the Turkey for our National Bird - oppose the Bald Eagle?

Guessing... Germany's symbol was an eagle?

Guessing... Germany's symbol was an eagle?

Good try, but not quite.

Good evening everyone,

Question time:
Swan

The Bald Eagle is our National Bird. Why did Benjamin Franklin - who wanted the Turkey for our National Bird - oppose the Bald Eagle?

He felt that the Bald Eagle was a coward............ I heard that when I was a child. That was a very long time ago.... :O)

You're getting closer, but the reason B. Franklin opposed the Bald Eagle as our National Bird is a little more specific. 🙂

He called it “a Bird of bad moral Character” that “does not get his Living honestly.”

"You may have seen him perch’d on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk [Osprey]; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him."

"Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District."

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/holidays/2013/11/benjamin_franklin_turkey_symbol_why_he_hated_the_bald_eagle_for_the_great.2.html

He called it “a Bird of bad moral Character” that “does not get his Living honestly.”

"You may have seen him perch’d on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk [Osprey]; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him."

"Besides he is a rank Coward: The little King Bird not bigger than a Sparrow attacks him boldly and drives him out of the District."

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/holidays/2013/11/benjamin_franklin_turkey_symbol_why_he_hated_the_bald_eagle_for_the_great.2.html

Yes. The Bald Eagle steals fish from the Osprey.
(Thank you once again for your computer genius...)

Oh I did look this up after my answer - just an FYI small birds harass birds of prey on a regular basis and bird watchers use the noise of the smaller birds to find the bigger ones...

Supermoon and Shooting Stars - Can't-Miss August Astronomy

The Perseid meteor shower is the only active annual shower that occurs over the summer, therefore it is often the most watched. This year the meteors will peak between August 10 and 13, but a full moon (the Supermoon) rises on August 10, interfering with the view.

The constellation Perseus, from which the Perseid meteors appear to emanate, rises in the northeast after sunset. The moon is ahead of Perseus on the 10th, in the constellation Capricornus, and moves closer to Perseus over the next few nights. However, put your back to the moon and look to the other regions of sky, where the meteors will be shooting toward, and you may still get a decent evening of meteor-watching.

Full moon in August occurs just 22 minutes after perigee, when the moon is closest to Earth in its orbit. This makes August’s full moon the closest full moon of the year, which, in recent years, has saddled it with the name Supermoon. The precise timing of full moon is August 10 at 11:09 a.m. PDT. However, the moon will not rise above the horizon until the evening. Even several hours later the moon will still be more than 99% fully lit.

The brightest planets lie in the morning sky in August, with Jupiter and Venus meeting up for the closest conjunction of two planets this year on August 18 before sunrise. The planets will be less than a half degree apart as they rise in the east-northeast, battling the rapidly approaching daybreak.

Watch the moon play leapfrog with a string of stars and planets. Look southwest on August 1 to see a line with the moon, bluish Spica, Mars, and Saturn. On the next night Mars will have leap-frogged over Spica to lie between it and Mars. On August 3 the moon has jumped over Mars to position itself between Mars and Saturn. By August 4 the moon has moved itself to the end of the Spica-Mars-Saturn line.

Mars is also moving in the same direction of the moon, just more slowly. The Red Planet heads toward Saturn and passes below it from August 22 to 25. The two planets will shine at about the same magnitude. The moon re-enters the scene on August 29, close to Spica, nearing Mars and Saturn on August 30, until it is right upon them on August 31.
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-4-july-august/green-life/supermoon-and-shooting-stars?utm_source=insider&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

Beautiful Biology:

"Life: Magnified" Online

Life: Magnified is an exhibit of scientific images showing cells and other scenes of life magnified by as much as 50,000 times. The exhibit is on display at Washington Dulles International Airport's Gateway Gallery from June through November 2014.

All life is made of cells. Your body contains trillions of them, each smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Scientists use state-of-the-art microscopes to study cells from microorganisms, animals or humans in their quest for insights about health and disease. Many of these scientists receive support from the National Institutes of Health, the nation's medical research agency.

Here we feature high-resolution versions of all 46 images in the collection along with longer captions than in the airport exhibit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upRqAaCEEhw

Origins of Mysterious World Trade Center Ship Revealed

In July 2010, amid the gargantuan rebuilding effort at the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, construction workers halted the backhoes when they uncovered something unexpected just south of where the Twin Towers once stood.

At 22 feet (6.7 meters) below today's street level, in a pit that would become an underground security and parking complex, excavators found the mangled skeleton of a long-forgotten wooden ship.

There's Now a Reason to Go Fossil Hunting on the Moon

Paleontologists often have to brave extreme environments, like the Gobi Desert or the mountains of Antarctica, to track down new fossils. But a study released yesterday in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society suggests looking to an even more remote environment for fossil hunters: the Moon.

The open access study was led by University of Kent space scientist Mark Burchell, who notes in the paper that “the idea that biological material can successfully migrate through space is an old one.”

Indeed, the concept of “panspermia,” or the distribution of lifeforms throughout the universe via asteroid, meteor, and comet impacts, was pioneered by the Victorian scientist Svante Arrhenius.

But debate over the hypothesis has heated up over the last few decades, especially when, in 1996, astrobiologists suggested the Martian meteorite ALH84001 might contain fossilized Martian microbes.

Surprisingly, Burchell’s team says it's the first to actually test the legitimacy of the idea that fossils dislodged from Earth could survive the original impact, then a trip through space, and finally, another traumatic collision with the lunar surface.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMPUTER (infographic)

The computer turned out to be quite a useful invention, didn't it?

After initial predictions that there would be a world market for "maybe five computers" (Thomas Watson, IBM President, 1943), the concept gathered pace before exploding into the world-changing device that we now know (and which you're reading this on).

'Quantum Cheshire Cat' becomes reality

...But quantum theory predicts that a particle (such as a photon or neutron) can become physically separated from one of its properties - such as its polarisation or its magnetic moment (the strength of its coupling to an external magnetic field).

"We find the cat in one place, and its grin in another," as the researchers once put it.

The feline analogy is a nod to Schrodinger's Cat - the infamous thought experiment in which a cat in a box is both alive and dead simultaneously - illustrating a quantum phenomenon known as superposition.

From 33 Unbelievable Places To Visit Before You Die:

Underwater Waterfall, Mauritius Island

Strong ocean currents continually drive sand from the shores of Mauritius into the abyss below, creating this one-of-a-kind underwater waterfall.

Nice optical illusion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kccWna71sqk

Beyondness....
Swan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yIrAXZlSx8