Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it
"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."
My name is Hamsler, im 17. you can call me hammy. i live in new york, but i am dominican. i love science, skateboarding, and weed.
Cloud suicide will wake black hole sleeping giant
The sleeping giant at the centre of the Milky Way is about to wake up. A suicidal gas cloud is heading towards the galaxy’s supermassive black hole, which will probably swallow the cloud, generating enormous flares of radiation that could help explain why the black hole is normally so placid.
The doomed cloud was a surprise to astronomers. “We have been looking at the galactic centre for 20 years, but mainly to observe the motion of stars,” says Reinhard Genzel
The team realised that the cloud also appears in earlier images, giving them a sequence that reveals its path. It is moving at almost 2500 kilometres per second towards our galaxy’s black hole, Sagittarius A*.
There’s no danger of the active black hole harming Earth. And though sadly not visible to the naked eye, this radiation will give astronomers clues as to why our black hole is normally so different from quasars.
Nightlight Mushrooms
Mycena lucentipes, which literally means “glowing stem,” are bioluminescent fungi whose stems glow so brightly that they illuminate the caps as well, creating the illusion that the entire mushroom is glowing in the dark. There are more than 60 species of bioluminescent fungi species, and the M. lucentipes is one of the brightest-glowing species.
Discovered in 2006 in São Paulo, Brazil, by researchers from Brazil’s Institute of Botany, the mushrooms are believed to glow to attract nocturnal insects and animals that can aid in spore dispersal. In the daylight, the mushrooms are a bland brown and tan color, but when night falls, their continuous bioluminescent glow shines through.
Credit: Cassius V. Stevani |Chemistry Institute, University of Sao Paulo
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Lophius Piscatorius
Or more popularly called ‘The Anglerfish’. To attract prey, this scary-looking fish uses a bioluminescent “fishing pole” that hangs just above and in front of its toothy face. The lure is actually a piece of dorsal spine packed with millions of glow-in-the-dark bacteria.
Credit: Jared Benney
Most carnivorous plants eat flying, foraging, or crawling insects. Those that live in or around water capture very small aquatic prey like mosquito larvae and tiny fish. On rare occasions, some tropical carnivorous plants have even been reported to capture frogs, or even rats and birds (although these creatures were probably sick or already near death)!
ATLANTIC WOLFFISH
Anarhichas lupus
©Espen Rekdal
The Atlantic wolffish’s distinguishing feature, from which it gets its common name, is its extensive teeth structure. Its dentition (teeth) distinguishes the Atlanitic wolffish from all the other members of the Anarhichadidae family. Both the lower and upper jaw are armed with four to six fang-like, strong conical teeth. Behind the conical teeth in the upper jaw, there are three rows of crushing teeth. The central row has four pairs of molars and the outer rows house blunted conical teeth. The lower jaw has two rows of molars behind the primary conical teeth. The wolffish’s throat is also scattered with serrated teeth.
The Atlantic wolffish are primarily stationary fish, rarely moving from their rocky home. They are benthic dwellers, living on the hard ocean floor, frequently seen in nooks and small caves. They like cold water, at depths of 76 to 120 meters (250 to 400 ft). They are usually found in waters of 34-37°F (1-2°C) and sometimes as low as 30°F (-1°C). Since they live in nearly freezing waters, in order to keep their blood moving smoothly, their blood contains a natural antifreeze.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawolf_%28fish%29
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Observation: Earth-like Planets Are Piling Up
A ground-based survey has turned up still more Earth-like exoplanets, including one on the inner edge of the so-called “habitable zone”, where conditions might be right for life. Maybe.
The High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) is a high-quality spectrograph attached to a 3.6 meter telescope in La Silla on the edge of Chile’s high-altitude Atacama desert. The instrument is designed to look for tiny wobbles in a star’s light created by planets as they orbit it.
The system is among the most sensitive available and has already spotted over 100 new worlds in the eight years it’s been running. Most of those have been objects with roughly the mass of Neptune, but HARPS also revealed Gliese 581, which is home to a planet just under twice the mass of Earth and inside the habitable zone.
The real prize in the planet-hunting business is discovering ‘Earth 2.0’ — an Earth-sized planet orbiting a star at a distance similar to our own. The best shot at such a discovery may go to Kepler, a NASA mission which is currently surveying around 150,000 stars for tiny planetary eclipses. The Kepler telescope is in the coldest reaches of space, which gives it a serious edge over those stuck on the ground.
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Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein’s:
Was Newton right and Einstein wrong? It seems that unzipping the fabric of spacetime and harking back to 19th-century notions of time could lead to a theory of quantum gravity.
Physicists have struggled to marry quantum mechanics with gravity for decades. In contrast, the other forces of nature have obediently fallen into line. For instance, the electromagnetic force can be described quantum-mechanically by the motion of photons. Try and work out the gravitational force between two objects in terms of a quantum graviton, however, and you quickly run into trouble—the answer to every calculation is infinity. But now Petr HoYava, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks he understands the problem. It’s all, he says, a matter of time.
More specifically, the problem is the way that time is tied up with space in Einstein’s theory of gravity: general relativity. Einstein famously overturned the Newtonian notion that time is absolute—steadily ticking away in the background. Instead he argued that time is another dimension, woven together with space to form a malleable fabric that is distorted by matter. The snag is that in quantum mechanics, time retains its Newtonian aloofness, providing the stage against which matter dances but never being affected by its presence. These two conceptions of time don’t gel.
The solution, HoYava says, is to snip threads that bind time to space at very high energies, such as those found in the early universe where quantum gravity rules. “I’m going back to Newton’s idea that time and space are not equivalent,” HoYava says. At low energies, general relativity emerges from this underlying framework, and the fabric of spacetime restitches, he explains.
HoYava likens this emergence to the way some exotic substances change phase. For instance, at low temperatures liquid helium’s properties change dramatically, becoming a “superfluid” that can overcome friction. In fact, he has co-opted the mathematics of exotic phase transitions to build his theory of gravity. So far it seems to be working: the infinities that plague other theories of quantum gravity have been tamed, and the theory spits out a well-behaved graviton. It also seems to match with computer simulations of quantum gravity.
HoYava’s theory has been generating excitement since he proposed it in January, and physicists met to discuss it at a meeting in November at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. In particular, physicists have been checking if the model correctly describes the universe we see today. General relativity scored a knockout blow when Einstein predicted the motion of Mercury with greater accuracy than Newton’s theory of gravity could.
Can HoYYava gravity claim the same success? The first tentative answers coming in say “yes.” Francisco Lobo, now at the University of Lisbon, and his colleagues have found a good match with the movement of planets.
Others have made even bolder claims for HoYava gravity, especially when it comes to explaining cosmic conundrums such as the singularity of the big bang, where the laws of physics break down. If HoYava gravity is true, argues cosmologist Robert Brandenberger of McGill University in a paper published in the August Physical Review D, then the universe didn’t bang—it bounced. “A universe filled with matter will contract down to a small—but finite—size and then bounce out again, giving us the expanding cosmos we see today,” he says. Brandenberger’s calculations show that ripples produced by the bounce match those already detected by satellites measuring the cosmic microwave background, and he is now looking for signatures that could distinguish the bounce from the big bang scenario.
Read More on HoYava’s New Theory of Gravity, Reshaping Space and Time
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