"Seeing" the Dark Matter of the Universe -Will New Technology Provide the 1st Glimpse?
News from Planet Earth & Beyond – is an eclectic text and video presentation of news and original insights on science, space, the environment and green technology.
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No more retro Mars Rovers getting stuck in sand! Presto! NASA's new army of tumbleweed beach ball robots will roll across the Red Planet surveying vast tracts of exotic Martian landcsape surface. Tt's a big, lightweight, two-story tall beach ball equipped with scientific instruments and propelled by nothing more than the thin Martian breeze.
Continue reading " Tumbleweed Ball Could Be Key to Exploring Mars" »
"For astronomers, watching anything in real-time is exciting. It's like we're biologists getting to watch cells grow in a petri dish, only our specimen is light-years away."
James Muzerolle of the Space Telescope Science Institute,
Astronomers operating the NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have observed odd behavior around a young star that offers a rare look into the early stages of planet formation. Something, perhaps a close companion to the star — either a star or a developing planet — could be shoving planet-forming material together, causing its thickness to vary as it spins around the star.
Continue reading "Live! From the Spitzer Space Telescope: The Birth of a Planet" »
Hiking through Yellowstone's pristine backcountry peaks and alpine valleys, you would never realize that you're traveling atop of the world's most massive active volcano. Only when you got down to the boiling thermals of Firehole River and the Geyser Basin whould you realize that you're a stranger in a strange land.
Continue reading "Yellowstone: The World's Most Massive Supervolcano" »
We've never seen anything as spectacular and informative as this Interactive Sky Map from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Since its launch on July 23, 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been NASA's flagship mission for X-ray astronomy, taking its place in the fleet of "Great Observatories."
The map is just dazzling, and it's easy to navigate the universe. Just click on a colored diamond and you're transported into another visual world along with concise descriptions -everything from the "Rivers of Gravity that Define the Cosmic Landscape" to "Astronomers Take the Measure of Dark Matter in the Universe." The Chandra Map's galactic navigation includes galaxies, galaxy clusters. black holes, normal stars, star clousters, white, red, and brown dwarfs.
Mount Thor is a mountain in Auyuittuq National Park, on Baffin Island, Nunavut, Canada with thr greatest vertical drop on the earth, with a sheer 4,100 foot drop! Rappel, anyone?
The mountain is located 46 km (29 mi) northeast of Pangnirtung and features the Earth's greatest purely vertical drop at with an average angle of 105 degrees. The location is popular with rockclimbers , despite its remote access with the only official site being at the entrance to the Akshayuk Valley near Overlord Peak. Mount Thor was first climbed in 1953 by an Arctic Institute of North America team, who climbed the North Tower. The world record for longest rappel was set on Mount Thor, July 23, 2006, by an American team. A 26-year-old Canadian Park Ranger, Philip Robinson, also rappelled, but had a problem with his equipment and was killed when he dropped to the base of the mountain.
Casey Kazan
Twenty years ago, astronomers witnessed one of the brightest stellar explosions in more than 400 years. The titanic supernova, which actually blew up about 161,000 B.C., blazed with the power of 100 million suns for several months following its discovery on Feb. 23, 1987. The star (called SN 1987A) is 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Continue reading "Image of the Day: The Weird Beauty of Supernova Explosions" »
Perfect for a peaceful Sunday's musing. Matisse in his brilliant
palette of color and exuberant genius. Enjoy this tour of his
art...which Matisse described in a 1925 interview: "Slowly I discovered
the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the
expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality."
Did you know that the only superstition Leonardo is known to have purposely shown in his painting The Last Supper has to do with the figure of Judas.
Scholars point out that in the pre-restoration version of the Last Supper, the renegade apostle can be seen spilling the table salt to indicate that a great evil was about to be perpetrated against Jesus. Salt used to serve as the Roman soldiers’ salary (accounting for the phrase “salt money”), and spilling salt means simply wasting money and bringing bad luck on the person doing so.
A social network for sci-fi geeks, gamers, animators, writers, and actors has been launched. Whether you are an actor, writer, animator or gamer MyOuterSpace.com says they have a home for you. Creative Talent, be sure to register on the planet that hosts your specialty, and you may be selected by a Captain to join their starship crew. Visitors won't be able to participate on a Starship Project unless they become a citizen of a United Planet.
Actually, according to the industry pundits at TechCrunch, "the site seems less like a social network than a way to crowdsource sci-fi movie and game projects."
Cyberwar declared as China hunts for the West’s intelligence secrets
It is estimated that in the past year the number of attacks on US government agencies rose to 1.6 billion per month. Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China. British and American cyber defences are among the most sophisticated in the world, but a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a “well-placed bomb as “nation-state hackers” seek out US technology, intelligence, intellectual property and even military weapons and strategies.
G-Speak will make the keyboard and mouse obsolete
The mouse may soon become obsolete, with interfaces that interpret gestures rapidly approaching a stage at which they can be released for general consumers. A new system being developed by Oblong Industries harnesses gesture technology that uses special surfaces and displays that can track hand movements, providing the operator is wearing the special conducting gloves. The system works with images and videos, and has been dubbed the “G-Speak” spatial operating environment (SOE). In a G-Speak environment everything on screen can be directly manipulated by gestures such as pointing, and the system simplifies the control of real-world objects such as robots or vehicles, and allows physical tools and interfaces to be used as input devices.
And the Oscar for Best Supporting Technology Product Placement Goes to...Apple!
The Awl put together a great piece examining the popularity of Apple products in film. Not editors, effects specialists, composers, or photographers using Apple products, or even celebrities owning iPhones--but the insane frequency with which Apple shows up in movies, without it being official product placement. It's nuts. Some of the key facts: of the 44 movies that ranked number one at the box office for at least one weekend this year, 18 of them (over 40%) featured an Apple product. Apple products appeared in more number one movies that any other brand, including Pepsi, which had held that somewhat honorable spot for nearly a decade.
Wizard of Cupertino Steve Jobs announced Friday morning that the Apple iPad will go on sale April 3, and with that news revealed One More Thing that even iFixit won’t find: It’s magic. The “iPad is something completely new,” said Jobs. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product. and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.” Jobs’ quote about the “magical” nature of the iPad might have roots in the third law of British science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Expectation is running high for this device, with good reason. In this extraordinary image, Spiral Galaxy NGC 1068 (50 million light years from Earth) also well known as M77, is hiding a central powerful source of x-rays -- likely a supermassive black hole -- from direct view. X-rays are still scattered into our line-of-sight though, by a dense torus of material surrounding the black hole. A hot wind of gas streaming from the galaxy's core is seen as the broad
swath of x-ray emission while material lit up like a flashlight by the
hidden black hole source is within the central cloud of more intense
x-rays. The scenario is supported by x-ray data from the Chandra Observatory combined with a Hubble Space Telescope optical image in this false-color composite picture. Optical data in red shows spiral structure across NGC 1068's inner seven thousand light-years with the x-ray data overlaid in blue and green.
Continue reading "The Monster at the Center of Galaxies: Destroyer of Stars" »
The Herschel Space Observatory using the telescope's heterodyne instrument for the far infrared has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potentially life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy known to be one of the most prolific chemical factories in space, although the full extent of its chemistry and the pathways for molecule formation are not well understood.
By sifting through the pattern of spikes in the spectrum, astronomers have identified a few common molecules that are precursors to life-enabling molecules, including water, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, methanol, dimethyl ether, hydrogen cyanide, sulfur oxide and sulfur dioxide.
Continue reading "The Orion Nebula: A Vast Organic-Molecule 'Factory' -Precursor to Life" »
Antimatter Lightning! We're going to do our best, but nothing we could
possibly write will be as awesome as the fact that's real and on Earth.
In fact, nothing you ever read for the rest of your life will be as
awesome as that, and it's only the way human memory degrades with time
that'll let you ever get excited about anything ever again.
Like all the most discoveries, it was unexpected. The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope was launched to examine the universe for the stupendously powerful processes that produce gamma ray bursts, from black hole jets to the effects of dark matter itself, only to find blasts coming from behind it. From Earth.
No mass extinction on Earth has been so tightly linked to an impact as
the Chicxulub Crater which cuts across the northern Yucatan peninsula
in Mexico in a mighty arc 170 kilometers (105 miles) across. The
crater's size implies an asteroid some 10 kilometers -seven miles- wide
and reaching a depth as deep as the deepest ocean trench plunging the
Earth into a global winter night that cut off photosynthesis for
months, even years.
But one other may make the Chicxulub impact look like a 4th of July event.
The ISAAC infrared images of the famous Pillars of Creation region of the Eagle Nebula, Messier 16, show a zoom into the centre with the infrared view of the "dark angel" columns and their immediate surroundings. In early 2007, scientists using the Spitzer discovered evidence that potentially indicates the Pillars were destroyed by a nearby supernova explosion about 6,000 years ago, but the light showing the new shape of the nebula will not reach Earth for another millennium.
"Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before."
Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University
Will unmanned robotic missions be able to detect weird microscopic life-forms they are not programmed to recognize that might be lurking below the surface of Saturn's Titan, or beneath the murky seas of Jupiter's jumbo moon, Europa?
A new study outlines the uncomfortable question of what happens to the planet’s biodiversity when cities take over the world. Cities are growing, and they’re growing fast. It is projected that urban growth will create an additional 350,000 square miles of cities roads, buildings and parking lots—covering a combined area the size of Texas—by 2030. Every week humans create the equivalent of a city the size of Vancouver. What will this staggering growth mean for both nature and people?
"Every week humans create the equivalent of a city the size of Vancouver."
With an age of a few million years at most, the area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467 is an extremely active stellar nursery, where new stars are born continuously from large clouds of dust and gas. The image, looking like a colourful cosmic ghost, contains the open clusters Haffner 18 (centre) and Haffner 19 (middle right: it is located inside the smaller pink region) as well as vast areas of ionised gas. The bright star at the centre of the largest pink region on the bottom of the image is HD 64315, a massive young star that is helping shaping the structure of the whole nebular region.
Credit:
ESO
"This star likely is almost as old as the universe itself,"
Anna Frebel, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Astronomers have discovered a relic from the early universe -- a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, the star has a remarkably similar chemical make-up to the Milky Way's oldest stars. Its presence supports the theory that our galaxy underwent a "cannibal" phase, growing to its current size by swallowing dwarf galaxies and other galactic building blocks.
Continue reading "Relic Star Almost as Old as the Universe Discovered in Dwarf Galaxy " »
Noah Petro of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
The elevation map below covering the eastern portion of South Pole-Aitken basin, including the Apollo Basin, was made using data from Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft.
Continue reading "Ancient, Hidden Moon Exposed by Massive Asteroid Impacts" »
New evidence for the existence of Earth’s magnetic field has pushed
its age back about 250 million years, suggesting that the planet’s earliest
life was shielded from the sun’s most harmful cosmic radiation.
Scientists at the University of Rochester have discovered that the Earth's magnetic field 3.5 billion years ago was only half as strong as it is today, and that this weakness, coupled with a strong wind of energetic particles from the young Sun, likely stripped water from the early Earth's atmosphere. The findings suggest that the magnetopause—the boundary where the Earth's magnetic field successfully deflects the Sun's incoming solar wind—was only half the distance from Earth it is today.
Continue reading "Earth's Magentic Shield 3.5 Billion Years Old Shielded Early Life" »
Asteroids are believed to be the building blocks of planets - primordial relics left over from the formation of the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago.
We thought it would be a perfect follow the NASA video with a survey of what the scientific world thinks would happen to the human species and life on Earth in general if an asteroid the size of the one that created the famous K/T Event of 65 million years ago at the end of the Mesozoic Era that resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs impacted our planet.
Continue reading "Scary Zone: NASA Extraterrestrial Impact VIDEO" »
Astronomer's are discovering almost daily that galaxies are voraciously hungry entities, growing by merger and acquisition, Here, a pair of galaxies NGC 1531/2, are engaged in a deadly waltz, located about 70 million light-years away towards the southern constellation Eridanus (The River). The deformed foreground spiral galaxy laced with dust lanes NGC 1532 is so close to its companion — the background galaxy with a bright core just above the centre of NGC 1532 — that it gets distorted: one of its spiral arms is warped and plumes of dust and gas are visible above its disc. The cosmic fandango leads to another dramatic effect: a whole new generation of massive stars were born in NGC 1532 because of the interaction. They are visible as the purple objects in the spiral arms.
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