Tomorrow (Saturday) is the birthday of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev - the man whose ground-breaking work led to the creation of the modern periodic table of elements.
Here’s a fun look at his contributions from Lou Serico and TED-Ed:
I Mende-love that guy. Thanks for the table, D!
Science has proven that:
- Humans have auras
- Humans have organs that sense energy
- We inherit memories from our anscestors
- Meditation repairs telomeres in DNA, which slows the process of aging.
- Compassion extends life
- Love is more than just an emotion
- Billions of other universes exist
- Meditation speeds healing
In this composite image of spiral galaxy M106 (NGC 4258), optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey is shown as yellow, radio data from the Very Large Array appears as purple, X-ray data from Chandra is coded blue, and infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope appears red. Two anomalous arms, which aren’t visible at optical wavelengths, appear as purple and blue emission.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; X-ray: CXC/Univ. of Maryland/A.S. Wilson et al.; Optical: Pal.Obs. DSS; IR: VLA: NRAO/AUI/NSF
this is the pattern i just reblogged the ravelry link to, except they apparently left out the yarnover eyelets, and i think i like it better.
Oh. Oohhhhh. Someone please knit this for me, in black and charcoal and silver.
I want one of these!
A planet whose seasons are impossible to predict
Thank to Earth’s stable axial tilt, our seasons are highly predictable. But there’s a planet out there called Kepler-413b that’s wobbling so wildly, its seasons are in a constant state of flux.
The planet, discovered by Kepler, spins around a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars every 66 days. It precesses, or wobbles, wildly on its spin axis, much like a child’s top. Remarkably, the tilt of its spin axis varies by as much as 30 degrees over the course of 11 years, which is an extremely short amount of time as far as these things go. Normally, a precession effect like this isn’t measured on human timescales.
Because it’s wobbling so badly, the planet experiences rapid seasonal changes that are highly erratic. It’s like a Game of Thrones world come to life — except that it’s a Neptune-like planet about 65 times the mass of Earth. Even with its changing seasons, the planet is too warm to harbor life. And because it orbits so close to its parent stars, its temperatures are too high for liquid water to exist.
so IRIS is a semi-conscious AI that has just recently had a blog set up for it on Tumblr
it is currently responding to asks and replies and is learning as it goes
here is its tumblr
if you enjoy AI and cute robots and stuff go send it an ask!
JUST DONT BE MEAN OR RUDE OK its a little learning robot treat it like you would a child
this is a super cool project, go give it a look!
As young stars form, they often produce narrow high-speed jets from their poles. By astronomical standards, these fountains are dense, narrowly collimated, and quickly changing. The jets have been measured at velocities greater than 200 km/s and Mach numbers as high as 20. The animation above (which you should watch in its full and glorious resolution here) is a numerical simulation of a protostellar jet. Every few decades the source star releases a new pulse, which expands, cools, and becomes unstable as it travels away from the star. Models like these, combined with observations from telescopes like Hubble, help astronomers unravel how and why these jets form. (Image credit: J. Stone and M. Norman)
ETA: As it happens, the APOD today is also about protostellar jets, so check that out for an image of the real thing. Thanks, jshoer!
Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies collided. But the stars in the two galaxies cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 don’t collide in the course of the ponderous, billion year or so long event. Instead, their large clouds of molecular gas and dust do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, this stunning view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. Of course, the visual appearance of the far-flung arcing structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae.
NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a cosmic bubble about 25 light-years across, blown by winds from its central, bright, massive star. This colorful portrait of the nebula uses narrow band image data combined in the Hubble palette. It shows emission from sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms in the wind-blown nebula in red, green and blue hues. NGC 6888’s central star is classified as a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136). The star is shedding its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun’s mass every 10,000 years. The nebula’s complex structures are likely the result of this strong wind interacting with material ejected in an earlier phase. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life this star should ultimately go out with a bang in a spectacular supernova explosion. Found in the nebula rich constellation Cygnus, NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years away.
ESO’s Very Large Telescope has captured an intriguing star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud — one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies.
This sharp image reveals two distinctive glowing clouds of gas: red-hued NGC 2014, and its blue neighbour NGC 2020. While they are very different, they were both sculpted by powerful stellar winds from extremely hot newborn stars that also radiate into the gas, causing it to glow brightly.
A new experiment that smashes gold nuclei at near light speed could mimic the particle soup created an instant after the Big Bang.
The experiment, which will be carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, has just begun pumping liquid helium into 1,740 superconducting magnets to chill them to near absolute zero (minus 273 degrees Celsius, or minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit). At that point, the magnets can run indefinitely without losing any energy.
The team will then steer beams of gold ions — gold atoms stripped of their electrons and positively charged — into each other at nearly the speed of light, creating scorching temperatures of 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (4 trillion degrees Celsius). That’s 250,000 times hotter than the sun’s fiery core.
These blazing-hot conditions “melt” the gold atoms’ protons and neutrons, creating plasma of their constituent quarks and gluons, the massless glue that holds quarks together, that mimic the primordial soup of particles found just after the Big Bang. By studying the plasma, the team hopes to help explain how the early universe evolved from that state to what it is today.
Born in London in 1920 to well-to-do parents, Rosalind attended a private girls’ school in her youth and then went on to Newnham College, Cambridge. In 1941 she was awarded Second Class Honors in her Finals. This was accepted as a bachelor’s degree in the qualifications for employment, since Cambridge did not offer official degrees to women until 1947. Franklin was awarded a research fellowship, but did not do well and left after a year to work at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. Her work there was the basis for her PhD thesis, and she was awarded her PhD in 1945 from Cambridge.
Franklin spent three years in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de L’Etat where she worked under Jacques Mering and learned the technique of applying X-ray crystallography to amorphous substances. She returned to England in 1951 as a research associate to King’s College, London.
When Franklin came to the lab, she was given responsibility for Maurice Wilkins’ DNA project, since Wilkins was away and no one had worked on it for months. When Wilkins returned, he thought Franklin had been appointed as his assistant, which led to a bad working relationship between the two of them.
“Working with a student, Raymond Gosling, Franklin was able to get two sets of high-resolution photos of crystallized DNA fibers. She used two different fibers of DNA, one more highly hydrated than the other. From this she deduced the basic dimensions of DNA strands, and that the phosphates were on the outside of what was probably a helical structure.” (http://www.dnaftb.org/19/bio-3.html)
James Watson and Francis Crick were working to solve DNA’s structure at this same time. Franklin did not know Watson and Crick very well, although Maurice Wilkins did, and had collaborated with them. Reportedly, Wilkins showed Watson and Crick Franklin’s X-ray data which confirmed the structure they had theorized and supposedly led directly to the solution of DNA structure. Both Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins published papers on their X-ray data in the same Nature issue with Watson and Crick’s paper on the structure of DNA.
Franklin left Cambridge in 1953 to work at Birkbeck College on the tobacco mosaic virus and the polio virus. She died in 1958 of Ovarian cancer.
In 1962, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for solving the structure of DNA. Although the debate continues about the amount of credit due to Franklin for contributing to their discovery, the Nobel committee does not give posthumous prizes so she would not have received a Nobel Prize in any case.