These are some cool pictures I assembled after a session of web browsing.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Top 20 pictures of Space:
Some amazing shots of our amazing universe, enjoy!
Pillars of Creation
This image, entitled ‘The Pillars of Creation’ is one of the most famous photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope, and shows vast interstellar clouds. The picture captures a portion of the Eagle Nebula, and what we are seeing is actually the creation of new stars in this ‘young’ nebula.
Carina Nebula
These ethereal clouds of matter are found in the Carina Nebula, a bright formation that envelops several clusters of stars. Although it is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the night sky, it is far less well known and observed than more famous formations such as Orion due to its position deep in the Southern Hemisphere. The Carina Nebula is located in part of our own galaxy, approximately 6,500 to 10,000 light-years from the Earth.
Milky Way
This fabulous image from NASA shows the stars that swirl at the centre of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Clouds of dust normally block the view from Earth to the galaxy’s centre, but by using an infra red camera the photographer was able to reveal parts of the spectrum that are usually invisible.
Valles Marineris, Mars
This image, a collaged mosaic of 102 photographs taken by the Viking 1 Orbiter in 1980, shows Mars and the vast Valles Marineris that cut a deep gash through the planet’s equator. The system of canyons is 4,000 kilometres in length, 200 kilometres wide, 8 kilometres deep at its lowest points, and as such is the biggest known canyon in the solar system.
Orion Nebula
Ever since human beings turned their attention to the heavens they have been aware of the Orion Nebula, a celestial feature situated at the south of Orion’s Belt that is visible to the naked eye. The ancient Mayan culture of Central America had a folk tale that explained this smudgy star-filled part of the night sky. The Hubble Space Telescope captured this wonderful image of the nebula in 2006, offering humanity the most detailed glimpse of Orion yet.
More at designdazzling.com
What would happen if I drilled a tunnel through the center of the Earth and jumped into it?
This is a very cool article about what would happen if you could drill a hole straight through the Earth and jump into it.
Although it would be impossible to do this on earth, you actually could do this on the moon. The moon has a cold core and it also doesn't have any oceans or groundwater to mess things up. In addition, the moon has no atmosphere, so the tunnel would have a nice vacuum in it that eliminates aerodynamic drag.
So, imagine that the tunnel through the moon is 20 feet (7 meters) in diameter. Down one side is a ladder. If you were to climb down the ladder, what you would find is that your weight decreases. Gravity is caused by objects attracting one another with their mass. As you descend into the tunnel, more and more of the moon's mass is above you, so it attracts you upward. Once you climbed down to the center of the moon you would be weightless. The mass of the moon is all around you and attracting you equally, so it all cancels out and you would feel weightless.
If you were to actually leap into the tunnel and allow yourself to fall, you would accelerate toward the center to a very high speed. Then you would zoom through the center and start decelerating. You would eventually stop when you reached the tunnel's lip on the other side of the moon, and then you would start falling back down the tunnel in the other direction. You would oscillate back and forth like this forever.
If you could do this on earth, one amazing effect would be the ease of travel. The diameter of the earth is about 12,700 kilometers (7,800 miles). If you drilled the tunnel straight through the center and could create a vacuum inside, anything you dropped into the tunnel would reach the other side of the planet in just 42 minutes
Maybe this is the travel of the future?
Earth's sixth mass extinction: Is it almost here?
Here is another apocalyptic article, however this one wields some science behind the terror.
With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that have occurred just five times during the past 540 million years.
Each of these "Big Five" saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct.
In results of a study published in this week's issue of journal Nature, researchers report on an assessment of where mammals and other species stand today in terms of possible extinction compared with the past 540 million years.
They find cause for hope--and alarm.
"If you look only at the critically endangered mammals--those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations--and assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm," said Anthony Barnosky, an integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, and first author of the paper.
Barnosky is also a curator in the university's Museum of Paleontology and a research paleontologist in its Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
"A modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities," said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.
"Its continued progression, as this paper shows, could result in unforeseen--and irreversible--consequences to the environment and to humanity," said Lane.
Read more at sciencecodex.com
With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that have occurred just five times during the past 540 million years.
Each of these "Big Five" saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct.
In results of a study published in this week's issue of journal Nature, researchers report on an assessment of where mammals and other species stand today in terms of possible extinction compared with the past 540 million years.
They find cause for hope--and alarm.
"If you look only at the critically endangered mammals--those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations--and assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm," said Anthony Barnosky, an integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, and first author of the paper.
Barnosky is also a curator in the university's Museum of Paleontology and a research paleontologist in its Museum of Vertebrate Zoology.
"A modern global mass extinction is a largely unaddressed hazard of climate change and human activities," said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.
"Its continued progression, as this paper shows, could result in unforeseen--and irreversible--consequences to the environment and to humanity," said Lane.
Read more at sciencecodex.com
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