February 6, 2010
January 29, 2010
January 20, 2010
The Crystal Cave
122 degrees F. and 100% humidity make special suits and breathing gear mandatory, but these crystal structure would make it worth it. Beautiful!
January 2, 2010
December 16, 2009
Bring on the Future
Scientists decode the entire genetic code of skin cancer and lung cancer. Although this is just a first step in curing these (and other) cancer’s, it’s a huge first step. Equivalent to unearthing the Rosetta Stone in the detangling of Heiroglyphs.
December 14, 2009
December 7, 2009
Ex Libris
I may have posted this a while back, but it’s worth a re-post. The ultimate Geek Library.
November 15, 2009
November 13, 2009
Finally, Information You Can Use
What Would Happen if I Ate a Teaspoonful of White Dwarf Star?
“Everything about it would be bad,” says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let’s assume, though, that you’ve spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn’t kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. “You’d have to get your sample—which would be very hard to carve out—without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma,” Hammergren says. “And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium.”
read the whole thing.
November 6, 2009
Bird Bomber
A piece of a baguette dropped by a passing bird caused a shutdown at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.
The bird dropped some bread on a section of outdoor machinery, eventually leading to significant over heating in parts of the accelerator. The LHC was not operational at the time of the incident, but the spike produced so much heat that had the beam been on, automatic failsafes would have shut down the machine.
November 2, 2009
Interview
I posted a brief excerpt of this interview a few days ago. I finally just got around to watching the whole thing. It’s really good, and worth looking at if you’re interested in science and education (or just like cool stories well told by enthusiastic people).
October 29, 2009
October 13, 2009
daVinci
A new da Vinci portrait is discovered by finding a faint fingerprint of the master.
September 29, 2009
Unstable
Superheavy Element 114 is finally deemed unstable after long research. Bummer. Scientists had hoped that, after element 113, the very unstable massive elements might start to become stable again. Guess not.
September 18, 2009
September 17, 2009
September 14, 2009
Edge of Space
Two MIT students shoot pics from the edge of space using off-the-shelf stuff. And a budget of only $150. Cool!