We correlate any date between the two calendar systems by matching a known dated event in the Mayan system to the Julian date, then adjust to the Gregorian. The Mayans did not need Leap Years, and they are automatically adjusted in the Western calendar, so they have absolutely no bearing on this problem.

For the few who possibly may have never seen Feynman & Sagan rock the universe......

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I hate to ruin the upcoming Dark Knight Rises or anything...

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Physics Shows Batman’s Cape Is Suicide Machine

Where would Bruce Wayne be without the batsuit’s ubiquitous slick cape? Alive and well, according to physicists at the University of Leicester, who have revealed that the impact of the hero’s plunge back to Earth after a little lofty cape-gliding would be the equivalent of being hit by a car at 50 mph.

The tragic findings, published in the university’s Journal of Special Physics Topics by four final-year masters students, conclude: “Clearly gliding using a batcape is not a safe way to travel, unless a method to rapidly slow down is used, such as a parachute.”

The proposed parachute would surely diminish the impact of Batman’s stylish flourish when he flicks the cape aside on landing — not to mention, detract from the terror it instills in enemies when he goes for the full wing span, narrow-eyed bat impersonation, pre-attack.

Nevertheless, the physics is undeniable.

After accounting for the drag and lift forces acting on Bruce Wayne in flight, the doomed trajectory was calculated. The 15.4-foot wingspan is just half that of an ordinary hang glider and, when launching off an 492-foot-high Gotham city skyscraper and gliding (successfully, the team predicted) for around 1,150 feet, Batman’s velocity would peak at 68 mph before levelling off at a life-threatening 50 mph descent.

The paper does admit that variations in the angle of the glide were not taken into account, and could contribute to a safe landing. However, Batman would need to slow significantly to avoid becoming a messy afterthought for Gotham city’s road sweepers.

When the “memory cloth” cape was revealed in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight — a flexible material that stiffens when Batman passes an electric current through it from microcircuits in his right-hand glove — the Leicester team knew it would be rigid enough to mimic the aerofoil shape successfully employed by amateur wing gliders. However, its limitations grew clear as the study progressed, and there is little hope the issues will have been remedied in time for Dark Night Rises.

“If Batman wanted to survive the flight, he would definitely need a bigger cape,” suggested co-author David Marshall. “Or if he preferred to keep his style he could opt for using active propulsion, such as jets to keep himself aloft.

“If he really wanted to stick with tradition he could follow the method of Gary Connery, who recently became the first person to glide to the ground from a helicopter using only a wingsuit — although he only made it down safely using a large number of cardboard boxes.”

We’re not sure what’s worse — Batman taking pause between attacks to clamber out of a pile of cardboard boxes, or Commissioner Gordon having to create a new bat signal that more accurately represents Batman’s descending shadow, parachute intact. Quite possibly, the fact that the hardy grappling hook may have to be hung up after 70 years trumps all the above — the drama of zipping up a skyscraper would be rendered pointless when bystanders have to then watch Batman, stranded atop the building, resorting to taking the stairs.

Link to paper: https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/in...e/view/484/289

This has to be a hoax. Humans do not have blue blood.

WHAT MAKES A FART?
By Jonathan Smith

Did you know that no two farts are exactly alike? It’s true. Farts are sort of like snowflakes in that regard. Little, invisible, smelly, snowflakes.

While everybody past the age of 10 is well-versed in the manifold variety of farts and their associated sounds and smells and sensations and sobriquets, precious few of us know anything at all about the sources of their great diversity. Can you, for instance, explain the lingering piquancy of the "hot fart" in any greater scientific detail than "that one was spicy"?I can't. And that's sad. In order to rectify this egregious oversight by the American public school system and get the straight poop on the basics of butt-gas, I had a little sit down with Dr. Lester Gottesman, a proctologist from St. Luke's Roosevelt who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jerry Springer.

Vice: Hi Dr. Gottesman, so we’re here today to talk about farts.
Dr. Gottesman: Yes, I suppose we are.

What’s up with the wide variety of noises farts make? Why do some come out as squeakers and others like a diesel truck going up a mountain?
The kinds of flatulence are directly related to the amount of swallowed air and the ability of the intestine to degrade food stuff to gas. It also has to do with the shape of the sphincter when the gas is released. If the sphincter is tight, it will make a different noise than if it’s more relaxed.

Often times my farts feel physically hot. What causes that sensation?
The sensation of heat is when the internal sphincter opens a little to sample what’s in the rectum. That is a normal response. If there isn’t a great deal of gas, the body will expel it slower, allowing you to feel the fart’s heat. If there is a lot of gas, the gas comes out too quickly for the body to feel the heat.

Is the temperature of the slow, hot farts actually higher than the quick, cool ones?
The temperature should be the same. Again, it is a product of the amount and speed in which one expels gas.

What’s the reason behind the smell?
The smell has to do with the amount of absorbed products like methane, which is made by fermentation of what we eat, and that’s what causes the bad smell, basically. As a baby, when you’re born, passing through the vagina, you’re infected by the bacteria in your mother’s colon, and that’s the bacteria you’re dealt for your lifetime. Also, everybody is different in how they’ll digest wheat products, milk products, whatever. And if they are not digested properly there will be a lot of methane produced and a lot of acid, and that would tend to cause a stinkier bowl movement.

Wait, go back to that thing about the vagina.
A baby is born with a sterile intestinal track. During the delivery, there’s lots of fluid and stool and whatever, and it’s thought that at that exposure the baby’s colon is populated by the mother’s colon bacteria, thereby affecting the smell of the individual's farts for the rest of their lifetime. There’s also other theories claiming the colon is populated during the first few months of exposure to fecal material, but that probably doesn’t affect the smell as much as the initial intake of feces by the baby during delivery.

Wow. It's like original shit sin. Does what your mother ate prior to delivery effect the bacteria you get?

Yes. In fact, they now also think that the appendix keeps an arsenal of bacteria so that if, for whatever reason, the bacteria in your colon gets killed by antibiotics the appendix can repopulate your colon with the bacteria that you’ve had since birth. That’s the new thought as to why the appendix is around.

So the signature smell of your farts wholly depends on how much poop your mom had at the time…
It’s not the amount, just the type of bacteria.

OK, but that's really what determines your fart smell forever?
Well, there are also other components. Farts are made by two things. They are made by one, the amount of air you swallow--so people who drink a lot of soda, chew a lot of gum, suck on candies, they get a lot of air into their colon, and that air comes out in farts. The second component is gas production by the colon. The colon’s job is to break down the nutrients in food products, like proteins and fats and sugars, and in the process of breaking them down they produce either sulfur or methane, neither of which smell great. If, let’s say, the colon has stuff in it like grapes and beans, and if it’s just sitting there for a few days it’s just going to ferment more and more until it becomes very smelly, versus if what you eat goes through quickly--like if you had the same beans, but it came out eight hours later, you’ll tend not to have as much gas from those beans. So it has to do with what your intestinal transit is. For most people, it takes 32 hours from the time they eat something to the time they shit something. That’s the average, so that means there are people who move their bowels every three or four days, and they have more time for the beans to ferment in the colon, thereby producing larger amounts of gas and more frequent, smellier spasms of gas.

What’s the correlation between the increased level of farts and drinking beer or coffee?
Well, beer is carbonated, so that’s why it makes you fart. Coffee causes the sphincter muscles to relax just a little bit, so you tend to have more farts by accident if you’re drinking something with caffeine than if you aren't.
A lot of times when I wake up really early I have worse gas than when I wake up later in the day. Does that happen to a lot of people or just me?
You have worse gas early in the morning?

Yeah, like, if I wake up at six for whatever reason, I’ll be a lot gassier for the first couple of hours I’m awake than if I wake up at nine or so.
When do you move your bowels?

First thing in the morning.
Do you have a lot of gas with the bowel movement?

I do, but what I'm trying to explain is if I wake up at my normal time I don’t have that much gas, but if I wake up really early, whether or not I take a crap, I’ll still have a ton of gas that goes along with it. Well, it's possible the gas is being metabolized more by your the later you sleep. If you get up at six and take a dump at that time, the colon hasn’t had as much time to metabolize, so what’s coming out is incomplete, metabolized gas. That may be your answer, but honestly I've never heard of this before.

Well, that's disconcerting. Now, I imagine that you’re familiar with “oops poops.”
No, what’s that?

It’s when you think you’re going to fart, but then a little bit of poop comes out.
Oh, OK, sure.

What I've noticed is, often when it happens it's not preceded by the urge to shit--it just feels like it's going to be a regular fart. Does that have anything to do with poop speed or it's position in the intestines or anything? No, it has to do with the muscles of the anus. There are two muscles of control. One muscle, the internal muscle which is active all the time, it’s the one that allows you to sit on that chair without shitting on the chair, then you also have the external muscle which is a voluntary muscle like your biceps. And when you need to hold stool in it will contract, and keep the stool on the inside. The passage that you are describing happens for one of several reasons. One is that the internal muscle has become very labile, meaning any little input inside the anus causes it to relax. Sometimes it relaxes too much, and that can cause stool to slip out. The other reason is you could have hemorrhoids--everybody has hemorrhoids, but people with bigger hemorrhoids sometimes experience gas slipping out between the hemorrhoids and taking with it mucus material produced by the hemorrhoids, which can cause staining of your underwear.


That is shockingly gross. How long is gas in our body before it comes out?
About 30 hours. It has to go through five feet of large intestine, and 25 feet of small intestine.

http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/6121/assman5.jpg
This is an anal probe. The whole black part of the rod goes in.

Where does the differentiation between burps and farts occur? Why does some gas come out of your mouth vs. your ass?
It has to do with the configuration and the tone of muscles in your stomach. If you drink a whole lot of liquid with bubbles quickly, if you take one of these [picks up a can of diet Pepsi] and down it quickly there will be so much gas produced that the gas will need to go someplace, and the best place to go is to come back up. If you’re drinking a small amount, then it has time to work its way through the small intestine and get to the large intestine, at which point the body starts fermenting it.

OK, while I've got you here, what’s the strangest thing that you’ve seen up a butt?
Oh, a little of everything--beer bottles, milk bottles, every can of vegetable known to man.

Have you ever seen a beer bottle that broke up there?
No, they tend to stay together, beer bottles are fairly strong. I’ve also seen balloons, condoms, toys with the batteries still working.

Do those people waddle in?
Well, they usually wait until the middle of the night because they don’t want to be seen, and occasionally we have to operate on them.
Do you see more girls or guys with stuff stuck up there?
More girls than I would have imagined, but mostly guys--mostly gay guys. I’ve also had people who want me to operate on their anuses to make their fart sounds a little more appealing.

Get the **** out of here, what kind of a fart sound are they going for?
Generally they have a higher pitched sound, and they want something with a lower pitch.

Like a baritone versus a squeaker?
Basically. So I had to configure their anus skin so their fart sound would be more to their pleasing.

Oh shit, you actually did it? Someone paid you to make their farts sound better.
Well they tried to put it through with their insurance.

Which insurance company is willing to pay for that?
None, so far all the companies have denied it. But the people try and then they end up having to pay for it.

Any other weird stuff going on?
A lot of the gay guys I see do things like fisting and double fisting--you name it they do it. So you always have to be on your toes as to what they’ve potentially done to end up in the situation they’re in. I’ve had a patient, he was on crack, of course, but he put a pogo stick on the steps, and he shot it straight up his ass and messed up his colon and prostate.

Oh dear god please tell me you're joking.
Nope. Another case that comes to mind is a woman who took an egg whisk and put it up her husband’s butt, and that made a bad mess. Usually, for the majority of these accidents, people are on crack or coke.

When I eat a burrito, I shit that burrito out 2 hrs later....I don't care what science says.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for an experiment!!

Next time, add a bottle of green food coloring to your burrito. Verify when the Hulk turd makes an exit....

Post results.

Whooooah.....

Artificial jellyfish engineered out of rat heart muscles

http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/8...uturetechm.jpg

Scientists have made an artificial jellyfish out of rat heart muscles and rubbery silicon. When given an electric shock, it swims just like the real thing.

Future versions should be able to swim and feed by themselves.

“That then allows us to extend their lifetime,” John Dabiri, a professor of aeronautics and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology, told me.

The breakthrough is a big step toward the development of an artificial human heart with living cells. It also opens a window to a future where humans could loosen the constraints of evolution.

“The design of the heart that we have today is by no means the best physically possible design,” Dabiri said. “It is the one that evolution stumbled onto over the course of millions of years of random searching.”

It’s possible, perhaps probable, that there’s a better design out there for humans to discover. An artificial heart, for example, could be engineered to steer clear of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S.

Building a better pump

To get there, though, scientists must first understand how biology assembles its building blocks into a pump, Dabiri noted.

“We know pretty well how to build engineered pumps, things that are built out of steel and aluminum and so on,” he said. “We don’t have as good a handle right now in biology on how nature builds things out of muscle tissues.”

To start, they looked to the jellyfish, an example of a simple biological pump, and tried to build it in the lab from scratch.

Jellyfish essentially have two parts: muscle cells that squeeze down on the body, pushing out water and jetting the animal the opposite way, and elastic stretchy tissue (the jelly) that gently recovers to its relaxed shape after each pump.

“In our engineered system, we needed to have these two components,” Dabiri explained.

The team could have used jellyfish tissue and jellyfish muscle, but “it so happens that the building blocks we are more familiar with in tissue engineering come from the heart cells of rats,” he said.

The technique was pioneered by Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard and co-author of a paper describing the artificial jellyfish published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

It allows researchers to take rat heart cells and pattern them in different shapes and sizes that act as actuators – “things that can move, they can pump, they can flap,” Dabiri said.

For the jelly part, the team used a thin layer of silicone rubber.

Putting together the pieces

The next step was to put the two pieces together in the best possible way to get a functioning jellyfish. Instead of simply copying nature, the team tried out all kinds of muscle patterns, looking for the best.

“As engineers in this process of building artificial jellyfish, we simply don’t have the same constraints that evolution does,” Dabiri said.

“These organisms, as they evolve, have to worry about fending off predators, catching their prey, reproducing. All we have to do is show up in a lab and try to be creative.”

“So, it is a very different set of constraints that we have in terms of developing this, and so it is not surprising that we might find solutions that are different from what might have come through evolution.”

In the end, the team settled on a muscle arrangement that is similar to that of the jellyfish, but “not a carbon copy,” Dabiri said.

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When the team put the engineered jellyfish into a pool of ionized water and sent an electric signal through the water, the fish swam like a real jellyfish.

“We haven’t yet developed an internal pacemaking system within these artificial jellyfish, so the way that we control the functioning is, we shock them,” Dabiri explained.

Future of jellyfish and hearts
An internal pacemaker mechanism and chemical receptors that act as a nose to sniff out food are additions planned for future versions of the jellyfish, called Medusoid, to give it greater autonomy.

This might raise science-fiction fears of giant artificial jellyfish roaming the waters – note that there’s another group working on robotic jellyfish that will never run out of energy. But in reality, the main application for the technology would be in biomedicine. Even in its current form, Medusoid could be used to test the effect drugs have on the pumping mechanism of a heart, for example.

In the future, the research may lead to an artificial heart. One, perhaps, that is better than a healthy human heart. And if we can engineer better hearts, will we stop there? Does this open the door to a completely rebuilt – and improved – human?

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One week from today.... Curiosity and the 7 Minutes of Terror!!! Sounds like an awesome band name. But nope, it's the latest Mars Science Laboratory that is approaching the atmosphere of Mars right now.

This will mark our civilization's most ambitious, most daring, and most complicated space mission ever. It just blows my mind that we are able to attempt this feat well over 100 million miles from Earth.

Watch, and be amazed...

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Explanation: Next week at this time, there may be an amazing new robotic explorer on Mars. Or there may be a new pile of junk. It all likely depends on many things going correctly in the minutes after the Mars Science Laboratory mission arrives at Mars and attempts to deploy the Curiosity rover from orbit. Arguably the most sophisticated landing yet attempted on the red planet, consecutive precision events will involve a heat shield, a parachute, several rocket maneuvers, and the automatic operation of an unusual device called a Sky Crane. These "Seven Minutes of Terror" -- depicted in the above dramatic video -- will begin on Monday, August 6 at about 5:24 am Universal time, which occurs on Sunday night, August 5 for western North Americans. If successful, the car-sized Curiosity rover will rest on the surface of Mars, soon to begin exploring Gale Crater to better determine the habitability of this seemingly barren world to life -- past, present, and future. Although multiple media outlets may cover this event, one way to watch these landing events unfold is on the NASA channel live on the web.

Watch the NASA channel here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Interesting, but not a suprise.

When astronauts first touched down on the moon in 1969 as part of NASA's Apollo 11 mission — and for every Apollo mission that followed — they left behind evidence that they'd been there, some intentional and some necessary. The most iconic of these were six American flags, all of which were thought to have been destroyed by the harsh conditions on the lunar service or at least knocked over by now. As it turns out, all but one are still standing.

Photographs taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) satellite show that five of the flags are right where we left them. The first one, by Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, was blown down by the lift-off thrust from their lunar lander as it left the moon's surface to reunite with the orbiting command module. The LRO images also show objects such as the lunar rovers used by some Apollo missions, and even the tire tracks they left behind.

One of the most intriguing aspects of these photos is the fact that the remaining U.S. flags have all turned white. This happened due to bleaching by sunlight, which hits the flags for as long as 14 days at a time without any sort of atmosphere to filter its rays. Manufactured from nylon without any thought as to retaining their looks over the decades of lunar exposure — they weren't even expected to be standing for long — the flags cost only $5.50 in the 1960s. We're guessing that the flags eventually carried to Mars by Earth's astronauts will probably be made to last longer — and cost a pretty penny more.

So the US is showing the white flag to the invading aliens. DAMN YOU OBAMA!
;)

Uh huh huh.. Trouser snake...

The “trouser snake”
Note: not a trouser, and not a snake. Or a penis for that matter.

This bizarre amphibian was recently discovered in Brazil. Last year the Madeira River was drained to make way for a new dam. At the bottom, they found six of these strange creatures wriggling about in the mud. Around 30 inches long, they look bizarrely like huge grey penises - or perhaps that's just my dirty mind?
After study zoologists have confirmed that these are a new species of caecilian (a type of legless amphibian). Named Atretochoana eiselti, biologists are currently not aware of any living populations.

http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/9...8100583511.jpg

I cannot wait until the rover landing. NASA's future rides on this. Sure hope it works out.

Grossly overstated. However, I'm staying up late to see how it turns out.

Is it possible to find or manufacture an Earth like substance that essentially ignores our gravity? We need to get off the surface of this planet and build our civilization higher up. Closer to the sun's rays yes, but we can worry about that later.

WTF? Tell me you are drunk posting.

No Gravity doesn't belong to us. It's not an Earth based force. Gravity affects every body in the universe the same way. It is created by large bodies like planets and stars, which have huge amounts of mass. The greater the mass, the more gravity the body will exert on everything around it. There's no substance that can ignore the basic fundamental forces present in the universe.

There are 4 basic fundamental forces at work in our universe, that we're aware of. Strong force, weak force, electromagnetic force, and gravitational force. Everything we know says these forces are at work everywhere in the universe. These are essentially "laws" of the universe. Everything must obey.....

Building in trees would also accomplish this. I think a civilization built in trees would be really cool. Plus, it would be good for the environment.

ROFL I'm dead serious. You always see "the future" as floating platforms and junk. Is that really possible? Can we somehow do it?

I see. That's a bummer. Do we just build really high?

Sarcasm?

strong force and weak force? aren't those just degrees of force?

Have you never seen the Jetsons?

I BELIEVE THE ULTIMATE WARRIOR AND HULK HOGAN, WITH THEIR POWERS COMBINED, COULD PICK UP MOUNT EVEREST AND HURL IT INTO THE AIR WHERE IT WOULD STAY STAY FOR GENERATIONS OF LITTLE HULKAMANIACS TO ENJOY, BROTHER!

Nope.

Strong force is what is responsible for holding the nuclei of atoms together. It's very important on a micro scale. Essentially, it's the glue of the universe holding everything together. It's the strongest of the 4 forces by far. But it only has a very small radius of interaction. Like only on the subatomic level.

Weak force is responsible for radioactive decay. That's what allows stars like the sun to produce energy. It's the force that changes a neutron in an atom to a proton and electron, which causes an energy release. That energy fuels the entire universe.

Ironically, gravity is actually the weakest of all 4 forces. But it has an added advantage in that it interacts across very vast distances. As opposed to the other forces which interact on a much smaller scale. So gravity is very important because all the bodies in the universe are affected by it. It's the force that's most evident.

Anyway, I hope that explains it a little better...

Hmmm so essentially we're boned unless our orbit changes?


Because if it was possible I'd be frantically trying to be the first person to achieve such a thing.

What the hell are you talking about bud? Boned why?

If our orbit changes more than it normally does, then we're really boned. We don't want that happening at all. Even a slight change in Earth's gravity would be really bad for all us creatures living here. Our bodies are finely tuned to the exact amount of gravity we're used to here on Earth. If that changes, our bodies won't be able to cope. Our internal organs are accustomed to our gravity, and without it our body starts to break down. Without the exact amount of gravity we're used to, we'd be unable to do all sorts of things. Like farting, burping, shitting, pissing, digestion, etc. All the fluids in your body would start migrating to your upper body, causing dehydration and eventual death. Your muscles need gravity to work against, and without it all your muscles would atrophy. The fluid in your ear wouldn't provide equilibrium to your body without gravity, so you'd be in a constant state of dizziness and loss of balance.

Pretty much the worst thing ever.

I'm drunk? :BLVD:

UFOs.

Scientist Mohamed Babu from Mysore, India captured beautiful photos of these translucent ants eating a specially colored liquid sugar. Some of the ants would even move between the food resulting in new color combinations in their stomachs.

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http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/1...ts2600x451.jpg

http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/6...ts3600x445.jpg

More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...#ixzz1U9mFq1wR

Why?

Because Science! Ain't need no explanation...

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/8707/35290272.jpg

Because its cool as ****. Thats why.

http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/165...5705585410.jpg

http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/7725/...9054542419.jpg

Please consider...

http://www.penny4nasa.org/

Neural control of tuneable skin iridescence in squid

Squids are one of many animals capable of changing color when they feel threatened, frightened, or just need to be a little dressier, but while many animals can change color, almost none can do it as quickly as squid. It’s long been a mystery to science just how squid send the instructions to the cells that change their pigmentation, called iridophores, and how those cells respond to the stimuli so quickly. In an effort to find out what stimulates those cells, the DIY bio-hackers at Backyard Brains teamed with resaerchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Using a technique they had already tested by making a cockroach dance, the team attached an electrode to the squid’s dorsal fin, allowing them to send electrical impulses into the animal. The electrical impulses they chose to deliver? The Cypress Hill classic “Insane in the Brain.”


Filmed under a microscope, the result is perhaps the coolest life-form based music video since Yo La Tengo took on Jean Painleve’s underwater ballets.

This Is What The Music of Cypress Hill Looks Like Played Through A Squid
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http://www.geekosystem.com/cypress-hill-squid/

WOW!

This superbubble in the N44 nebula inside the Large Magellanic Cloud was carved out by exploding stars. The photo, released in August 2012, comes from the Chandra X-ray Space Telescope.
An artist's illustration of the alien solar system Kepler-47, a twin star system that is home to two planets. The planets have two suns like the fictional planet Tatooine in the "Star Wars" universe.

http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/M_4...ce7165f9d44ecc

Massive sun fart....


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This "long filament of solar material," as NASA calls it, was spotted tearing away from the Sun at upwards of 900 miles per second.

"It is hard to easily judge the size of this 3D event with a 2D image at this angle, but this filament is probably on the order of 30 Earths across, 300,000 kilometers or 186,000 miles," explained C. Alex Young, a solar physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

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One of the better non football threads on CP....Q!

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Space Sugar Discovered Around Sun-Like Star

What a sweet cosmic find! Sugar molecules have been found in the gas surrounding a young sun-like star, suggesting that some of the building blocks of life may actually be present even as alien planets are still forming in the system.

The young star, called IRAS 16293-2422, is part of a binary (or two-star) system. It has a similar mass to the sun and is located about 400 light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus. The sugar molecules, known as glycolaldehyde, have previously been detected in interstellar space, but according to the researchers, this is the first time they have been spotted so close to a sun-like star.

In fact, the molecules are about the same distance away from the star as the planet Uranus is from our sun.

Why is the sky blue?

It is easy to see that the sky is blue. Have you ever wondered why? A lot of other smart people have, too. And it took a long time to figure it out!

The light from the Sun looks white. But it is really made up of all the colors of the rainbow.

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/2150/prismen.gif

A prism is a specially shaped crystal. When white light shines through a prism, the light is separated into all its colors.

If you visited The Land of the Magic Windows, you learned that the light you see is just one tiny bit of all the kinds of light energy beaming around the Universe--and around you!

Like energy passing through the ocean, light energy travels in waves, too. Some light travels in short, "choppy" waves. Other light travels in long, lazy waves. Blue light waves are shorter than red light waves.

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All light travels in a straight line unless something gets in the way to—

reflect it (like a mirror)

bend it (like a prism)

or scatter it (like molecules of the gases in the atmosphere)

Sunlight reaches Earth's atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all the gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered in all directions by the tiny molecules of air in Earth's atmosphere. Blue is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.

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Closer to the horizon, the sky fades to a lighter blue or white. The sunlight reaching us from low in the sky has passed through even more air than the sunlight reaching us from overhead. As the sunlight has passed through all this air, the air molecules have scattered and rescattered the blue light many times in many directions. Also, the surface of Earth has reflected and scattered the light. All this scattering mixes the colors together again so we see more white and less blue.

What Makes a Red Sunset?

As the Sun gets lower in the sky, its light is passing through more of the atmosphere to reach you. Even more of the blue light is scattered, allowing the reds and yellows to pass straight through to your eyes.

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Sometimes the whole western sky seems to glow. The sky appears red because larger particles of dust, pollution, and water vapor in the atmosphere reflect and scatter more of the reds and yellows.

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The desk of Albert Einstein, photographed immediately after his death and featuring his unfinished manuscripts of the Unified Field Theory, a.k.a. The Theory of Everything, which aspired to summarize all the physical forces in the universe.

AP IMPACT: Surprising methods heal wounded troops

http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-surp...170546068.html

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Not a Sarlacc pit...

The mouth and esophagus of the leatherback turtle are a perfect example of how an animal can become adapted to its diet and habitat. When the turtle consumes jellyfish (and it must eat many, as jellyfish have low nutritional value), the esophagus stores both the jellyfish and the seawater that have been swallowed. However, to prevent the stomach filling with water, the seawater must be expelled. So how does this happen?

The answer lies in the backwards-pointing spikes you see in the mouth of the turtle, which continue down the esophagus and grow progressively larger. As the muscles of the esophagus squeeze the seawater out, the spines keep the jellyfish in place. Once all the water has been expelled the jellyfish are then passed into the stomach. This strange adaptation is one of many that have kept this magnificent species in existence for 90 million years.

http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/science/pub...tortue-eng.htm

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MOHillbilly at the dentist last week.

Look at them choppers!

Atomic bond types discernible in single-molecule images
By Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/456...9862880797.jpgLook closely: the bonds at centre are shorter than those at the edges, involving two electrons each

A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned. The same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the Olympic rings. The new work opens up the prospect of studying imperfections in the "wonder material" graphene or plotting where electrons go during chemical reactions. The images are published in Science.

The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM. AFM uses a tiny metal tip passed over a surface, whose even tinier deflections are measured as the tip is scanned to and fro over a sample. The IBM team's innovation to create the first single molecule picture, of a molecule called pentacene, was to use the tip to pick up a single, small molecule made up of a carbon and an oxygen atom. This carbon monoxide molecule effectively acts as a record needle, probing with unprecedented accuracy the very surfaces of atoms.

It is difficult to overstate what precision measurements these are.

The experiments must be isolated from any kind of vibration coming from within the laboratory or even its surroundings. They are carried out at a scale so small that room temperature induces wigglings of the AFM's constituent molecules that would blur the images, so the apparatus is kept at a cool -268C.

While some improvements have been made since that first image of pentacene, lead author of the Science study, Leo Gross, told BBC News that the new work was mostly down to a choice of subject. The new study examined fullerenes - such as the famous football-shaped "buckyball" - and polyaromatic hydrocarbons, which have linked rings of carbon atoms at their cores. The images show just how long the atomic bonds are, and the bright and dark spots correspond to higher and lower densities of electrons.

Together, this information reveals just what kind of bonds they are - how many electrons pairs of atoms share - and what is going on chemically within the molecules. "In the case of pentacene, we saw the bonds but we couldn't really differentiate them or see different properties of different bonds," Dr Gross said. "Now we can really prove that... we can see different physical properties of different bonds, and that's really exciting." The team will use the method to examine graphene, one-atom-thick sheets of pure carbon that hold much promise in electronics. But defects in graphene - where the perfect sheets of carbon are buckled or include other atoms - are currently poorly understood.

The team will also explore the use of different molecules for their "record needle", with the hope of yielding even more insight into the molecular world.

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/2...3562880034.jpgTiny distortions to the regular hexagonal pattern of carbon bonds is what interests the researchers

This is gonna be so awesome.....

http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/about.html

The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called JWST) will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. The project is working to a 2018 launch date.

The Webb will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.

Webb was formerly known as the "Next Generation Space Telescope" (NGST); it was renamed in Sept. 2002 after a former NASA administrator, James Webb.

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Webb is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is managing the development effort. The main industrial partner is Northrop Grumman; the Space Telescope Science Institute will operate Webb after launch.

Several innovative technologies have been developed for Webb. These include a folding, segmented primary mirror, adjusted to shape after launch; ultra-lightweight beryllium optics; detectors able to record extremely weak signals, microshutters that enable programmable object selection for the spectrograph; and a cryocooler for cooling the mid-IR detectors to 7K. The long-lead items, such as the beryllium mirror segments and science instruments, are under construction. All mission enabling technologies were demonstrated by January 2007.

In July 2008 NASA confirmed the Webb project to proceed into its implementation phase, and the project conducted a major mission review in March 2010. Here is a summary of the current mission status.

There will be four science instruments on Webb: the Near InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), the Near InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec), the Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), and the Fine Guidance Sensor/ Near InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (FGS-NIRISS). Webb's instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range. It will be sensitive to light from 0.6 to 28 micrometers in wavelength.

Webb has four main science themes: The End of the Dark Ages: First Light and Reionization, The Assembly of Galaxies, The Birth of Stars and Protoplanetary Systems, and Planetary Systems and the Origins of Life.

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September 13, 2012 — Scientists have discovered a new species of monkey in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The monkey, called "lesula" by locals, was discovered in June 2007 in the Congo when field scientists spotted a female that had been adopted by a primary school director.

The species has been given the scientific distinction Cercopithecus lomamiensis. Researchers say it is closely related to the owl-faced monkey (Cercopithecus hamlyni), which is also indigenous to the region.

Since the initial find, wild lesula have been spotted in the Congo, usually in small groups.

The species is characterized as a "shy" and "quiet" herbivore that lives in remote forests.

Lesulas are well-known to local hunters, and researchers warn that uncontrolled hunting practices could quickly lead to the species' "catastrophic decline".

Researchers DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THEY ****ING EXISTED until 2007, yet now they're gonna boo-hoo about the potential decline of the species?

They look tasty, though.

I recently read this article about Alligators in Florida and Louisiana getting messed up by steroids. Farmers are feeding their animals food that contains steroids and stormwater has caused the roids to leak into the swamp.

What is interesting is that now the female gators are growing faster than the males. Birth defects are increasing etc.

The gators are suffering from the exact same un-natural problems that humans are.

What makes this scary is that this is happening to animal that has survived for thousands of years because it is so tough. An animal that is incapable of contracting cancer or the HIV virus. An animal that heals open wounds normally in the nasty swamp but steroids are screwing them up.



We should be very concerned about this. The steroids in food are not good guys...

The matter all around you consists, by far, mostly of empty space.

If an atom were expanded so the orbit of the electron was the size of a typical major league baseball field, the nucleus would be the size of an ant in the middle.

Because there are so many atoms in stuff, it appears solid, and feels solid due to the repulsion between the electrons in whatever you are touching and the electrons in the atoms in your hand.

I haven't kept up with the thread so I don't know if this has been talked about but it's pretty cool either way.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_participate.php

It's a project by SETI. You download the program and you can run it as a screen saver or just in the background while you do other stuff and it analyzes noise from space looking for alien signals. It automatically transmits results back to SETI. While reading up on it they said they've only mapped out/listened to approximately 2% of space this way with over 2 million people looking over the last 7 or so years. Has anyone done this?

Yeah, I had SETI@home running on several machines at one time. But that was probably 10 years ago.

They've been running that since 1999....

What I read said they started around 7 years ago. Granted it was a wiki page so it was probably wrong. I haven't done it. Is there any interaction with it or does it just run on your computer? Say you actually found a signal, would you know?

I think you're a little confused bud. Alligators aren't getting messed up by steroids. There is some indication that other pollutants are affecting the internal sexual steroid production of male alligators. It's not causing females to grow larger, it's reducing the growth of males in some certain ways. Basically, they've found a lower plasma sex steroid level (that's naturally occurring steroids produced by the alligator's body) in males, and smaller alligator dicks from the ones in known contaminated lakes. And the contaminants are not steroids leaked in the water. They're organochlorine contaminants. Usually DDT pesticides, or some variant. The contaminants block the production of the naturally produced steroids in the alligator's body, which controls dick size.

It's not at all from steroids in our food. I'm afraid that has nothing at all to do with the situation. The only thing to get worked up about is the overuse of DDT and other organochlorines in the environment.

http://www.researchgate.net/publicat...n_Florida_(USA)

Same here....

Hell, I was sure I was going to find another WOW signal...LMAO

It looks cool on the screen. But in my understanding, the data is all recorded and sent to SETI, where it is then analyzed. I don't believe it's analyzed at all on the client. Just recording of data. I don't believe you would know if you "Found something". Putting an "Aha! You found aliens!" type of notification probably would be a bad idea....

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"Males from the higher contaminant site exhibited smaller phallus sizes than males from the intermediate and lower contaminant sites. Smaller phallus size in this case differed from that reported in Lake Apopka male alligators [Gen. Comp. Endocrinol. 116 (1999) 356] in that a significant positive relationship between body size and phallus size existed."


I knew living in Florida all my life was a bad idea, but who knew?

LMAO

Interesting read.... When I first started following this project a few years ago, they initially thought the water was being contaminted from stormwater runoff that came from poultry farms which is probably right. I think I got confused about DDT. I was thinking it was a steroid but in reality it's an insecticide commonly used around poultry farms. The DDT has been found in eggs. Other findings do include similar isssues which are happening to humans. This article talks about the female gators growing faster etc.

http://news.ufl.edu/2012/07/19/alligator/

I'll try and find the original article when I get time. It's scary stuff.

Here it is dude.... This is a good read from a few years back.. It freaked me out a little...

Ehh... you can find this type of thing just about anywhere. Not that it's a good thing. We should definitely watch our environmental pollution better than we have been. But I don't think it's a huge cause for concern. Today we're much much better off than we were a few decades ago. Back then regulation was very weak, and nobody cared much for environmental issues like we do today. Back then, you could bathe in DDT, and nobody thought much about it. Most of today's problems are from abuse and ignorance in the past. And the media has a knack for sensationalizing stories like this.

Life is adaptive. It will deal just fine. Floridians will just have small penises and life will go on...

That's right ladies... come to Georgia to find normal penises.... LMAO

So I can't figure this out.

If the surface of the earth is 1G, and earths gravitational pull is less the further you are from earth's surface, does that mean earth's gravitional pull increases when you go further into the surface..?

Black Bob wrong? Say it aint so!!

Man 1980 was a hell of a long time ago. Regulation was nothing back then. Now, like usual, the pendulum has swung to the other side.

In fact most all the ag chemicals are incredibly safe. You hear a lot about Nitrogen leach. It is a big deal, because the cornbelt puts on a shitassload and it does move. But it is so goddamn cost prohibitive now, everybody is is working to keep it from leaching. Almost all herbicides are super safe, plus you put an incredibly small amount of herbicide spread over a football field (roughly). ALS inhibitors, you apply one TENTH of a dry ounce per acre. Glyphosate, you put a pound on.

Insecticides are a bigger deal. It makes sense, the DNA of animals and humans is much closer to insects than plants. But again, regulations are off the ****ing charts for this stuff, and they are not applied nearly as heavily due to other technologies like BT corn and Veptera type products.

The reality is that the agricultural world is not even in the same ballpark it was in 1980.

Not exactly. It has a lot to do with the mass around you right where you are. More mass around you means more gravity. When you go further into the surface, theres less Earth below you to pull down. The farther you go, the less of Earth there is below pulling you down and the more Earth mass there is above pulling up. At the center you would be weightless because there would be equal mass above and below you, canceling each other out.

Definitely. I know because one day I was digging a hole with a backhoe and when I got done I stepped off and went to the edge of the hole to look in and I slipped and fell. By the time I hit the bottom I was going real fast and when I was at the top I was going slow.

Hogfarmer is sort of right. The traditional notion that the G field on earth gives 9.8 meters per second squared makes use of the fact ONE is outside the circumference of the earth and can therefore can place all of the mass as if it were at the center of the earth. And for a while g will increase if you are going underground. But once the amount of mass is significant over you compared to the center of the earth than g will drop. as you head to the center where there is "zero g." And technically I think the rebound back and forth through the earth should be close to orbital speed if the satellite was circling just above the holes (ignore air resistance and such)

Did you know that giraffes have 20 inch long blue tongues? The tongue is prehensile, and spends a lot of time hanging out so it's generally thought that the colour protects it from sunburn.

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I hate big gravity.

That reminds me of a question I heard/read somewhere:
If you could install a tube from one side of the earth to the other, somehow shielding it from the molten core and suck all the air out, what would happen if you jumped in one end?

The answer as explained was that you would go falling through the tube, accelerating quickly at first. You would slow down as you went through the center, but your inertia would carry you to almost the other of the tube, where you would come to a complete stop and get pulled back down. You would basically do this over and over and over, travelling a little less each time, until you were just floating in the center where the pull of the earth is the same in every direction (minus the directions of the empty tube).

I don't know if it's the correct answer, but it seems plausible and I've always wondered what it would feel like.

is this also assuming you have a way to deal with the immense pressure and heat that are associated with going to/through the core? you know, not even mentioning the gravity of the situation (heh).

you'd die from the acceleration alone, man. your corpse would do what you hypothesize, but it's impossible to feel ANYTHING when you're dead.

Dear Mr. Flu virus ,I think his scenerio was only hypothetical.

Um yeah... only hypothetical.

*starts shoveling dirt back into the hole*

Yeah, "somehow shielding it from the molten core and suck all the air out". Obviously it would be very hot, but let's assume you could completely insulate the tube from the heat of the core. And in a vacuum, there would be no pressure, right?

Can you elaborate on the acceleration? It should just start out at 9.8m/s/s, right?

Also, I was able to find a link to the original Straight Dope article:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...ough-the-earth

According to him: Perfect vacuum == Falling back and forth forever. But throw a little air resistance in and you eventually get stuck in the center.

LMAO

There goes the afternoon.....