Randomisation

Reaching for the Stars Bare branches of trees reach for...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 03:43:13 +0530

Reaching for the Stars

Bare branches of trees reach for stars in this starry November night of Sweden. This carefully framed black & white photo also shows the North America Nebula at right and the Andromeda Galaxy at the upper left. — P-M Heden

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Sat, 16 Mar 2013 03:41:19 +0530

thisistheverge: Play this: ‘Super Stickman Golf 2’ is like...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 03:41:16 +0530

thisistheverge:

Play this: ‘Super Stickman Golf 2’ is like regular golf, but crazy

Fishing isn’t the only mundane sport that can be improved through the power of video games: golf gets better with an ample dose of crazy, too. Available on iOS and Android, Super Stickman Golf 2 is the follow-up to the beloved original, and it doesn’t mess with the formula too much. You’ll still be trying to get a ball in a hole while navigating courses that would give even Super Mario a headache, using simple but intuitive controls and helpful power-ups.

Remember Aaron Swartz: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 06:33:20 +0530

Remember Aaron Swartz: Official Statement from the family and partner of Aaron Swartz :...

zerply: Serious Play #001 Tina Roth Eisenberg (aka...

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 22:16:50 +0530

zerply:

Serious Play #001

Tina Roth Eisenberg (aka swissmiss)

Photo by Julia Robbs (www.juliarobbs.com/)

A Random Rhyme

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:41:47 +0530

One of those things where the ‘words’ just kept coming to my head and I kept typing till...

scinerds: xombiedirge: Process to Progress 2013 by Paul...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 11:42:05 +0530

scinerds:

xombiedirge:

Process to Progress 2013 by Paul Sizer / Website

and for a scientifically literate society!

A Message This New Year

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 11:37:43 +0530

Most of my life I’ve treated new year’s as just another day. I dislike attaching value...

science-junkie: Harvard Scientist Proposes a Way to Refreeze...

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:35:11 +0530

science-junkie:

Harvard Scientist Proposes a Way to Refreeze the Arctic to Combat Possible Global Warming Disaster

The amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean shrunk to an all time low in September, with the area covered now only half of what it was in the 1980s. This alarming development along with the global community’s inability to come to a consensus about cutting CO2 emissions has led Harvard professor of applied physics David Keith to look at a technological solution to reversing the warming of the Arctic. In a paper published in Nature Climate Change and an affiliated study in the Environmental Research Letters, Keith proposes a way to refreeze the Arctic through geoengineering.

Injecting reflective particles into the high atmosphere could reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, counteracting the greenhouse gas effect. High CO2 levels would continue to trap heat in the atmosphere, but with less energy coming in, temperatures on the surface would go down. Keith suggests using the method for a regional correction to restore the ice cover in the Arctic. In his paper, he claims that “with an average solar reduction of only 0.5%, it is possible to recover pre-industrial sea ice extent.” A separate paper shows that this could all be done with a few modified Gulfstream jets and is estimated to cost around $8 billion, which is about the price of a installing a major oil pipeline.

But large-scale geoengineering like what Keith is suggesting is banned by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity because it could result in disastrous unintended consequences. Even Keith acknowledges that manually refreezing the arctic is not the right way to solve the larger problem of global warming. He thinks that this level of geoengineering would only be appropriate to consider in states of emergency such as a sudden collapse of ice sheets or a killing drought. But first, we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and he warns that “if we do this and we do not cut emissions, we just walk further and further off the cliff, like Wile E. Coyote.”

ikenbot: Black Holes Spew Out Surprise Black holes come in...

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:29:16 +0530

ikenbot:

Black Holes Spew Out Surprise

Black holes come in a variety of sizes, ranging from 10 times the mass of the sun to a billion times as massive. But new research shows that black holes of completely different masses, ages and locations can produce jets of ionized gas that behave similarly.

Image: This illustration shows a black hole emitting jets of fast-moving plasma above and below it, as matter swirls around in an orbiting disk. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“As scientists, we are always seeking universal principles,” Rodrigo Nemmen, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.

Nemmen and his colleagues studied a wide variety of black holes in an attempt to compare how efficiently their jets emitted light. “I was very surprised,” Nemmen said of the results.

Discovering similarities between ancient supermassive black holes in the center of distant galaxies and baby black holes born as stars collapse should help scientists gain a firmer understanding of these jets.

Cosmic accelerators

Black holes are well known for their ability to pull matter into them. But not all material near a black hole finds itself lost. Some bits of matter just outside the point of no return (called the event horizon) are accelerated away at near-light speeds, creating jets of particles shooting out above and below the black holes.

“I like to call black holes ‘cosmic LHCs,’ or very powerful particle accelerators,” Nemmen said, referring to the Large Hadron Collider, an underground machine in Switzerland that speeds protons to 99.9999991 percent the speed of light.

When matter is spun away from a black hole in the form of a jet, most of its energy goes into its motion, but some of it is changed into light in the form of gamma-rays. Nemmen and his team studied findings on 293 previously observed black holes and calculated how efficiently the jets converted energy to light. They found that the rate scaled across the range of black holes.

“This was one of the surprises of this work, that this efficiency of conversion of the energy into light is essentially the same for black holes with very different masses, very different ages and completely different environments,” Nemmen said.

Black holes are powerful beasts, interesting in and of themselves. But by accelerating ionized gas, they also have the potential to change their environment. Heating up space, they could affect the production of new stars, thereby influencing the galaxy they live in.

“These jets might be powerful agents of creating changes in the host galaxy,” Nemmen said.

Scientists still don’t have a strong understanding of how these violent particle outflows form. But the fact that the energy efficiency of the jets scales across black holes may help theorists better understand how something that pulls in most particles could shoot away others, and how the outflow of energy may affect surrounding space.

The findings were published online today (Dec. 13) in the journal Science.

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Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:20:48 +0530

sparth: Fictive museum

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:20:12 +0530

sparth:

Fictive museum

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Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:16:00 +0530

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Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:15:26 +0530

their-helicopters-sing: 8 by *tiger1313

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:15:03 +0530

their-helicopters-sing:

8 by *tiger1313

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Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:14:29 +0530

skipsterling: “Fool’s Alphabet” Chocolate Chips & Rocket...

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:12:32 +0530

skipsterling:

“Fool’s Alphabet”

Chocolate Chips & Rocket Ships

1 of 99½ children’s poems by John O’Marra

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Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:11:42 +0530

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Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:10:51 +0530

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Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:10:13 +0530