Oxidants Happen

decryptions: Favorite Support: Leona, the Radiant Dawn

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:21:34 -0600

decryptions:

Favorite Support: Leona, the Radiant Dawn

Photo

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:21:25 -0600

we-are-star-stuff: This is an example of supercooling – the...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:40:54 -0600

we-are-star-stuff:

This is an example of supercooling – the process by which a very pure liquid is chilled to a temperature just below its usual freezing point without actually making the jump to its solid state. Bottled water is perfect for this, especially the kind that’s been purified via reverse osmosis, a process that strips water of all its particulates. This particulates can act as “seed crystals,” or “nuclei,” to which a liquid phase on the cusp of becoming solid can attach, and crystalize around. In this video, a seed crystal is introduced in the form of a cube of already-frozen water. As soon as it’s introduced, the liquid phase rapidly crystallizes and attaches to the solid one, kicking off a chain reaction of ice-formation.

Water that freezes as it’s being poured out of the bottle also solidifies upon exposure to a seed crystal, which, in this case, is an already-frozen surface. This is similar to the effect observed when freezing rain, supercooled by its flightpath through sub-freezing layers of atmosphere, comes into contact with an object cooled to a temperature below freezing. The result is a phenomenon known as glaze-ice, which – if you live somewhere cold – you may have seen before, coating the spindly extremities of tree branches.

See here for more on supercooling and glassy water.

via

acousticwindow: somethingtogrow: What color is Tuesday? The...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:39:58 -0600

acousticwindow:

somethingtogrow:

What color is Tuesday? The science of metaphor by using multiple senses to interpret the world.

The narrator (and the writer) is one of the giants in synesthesia research. We owe him a debt for all we know about synesthesia :)

saborunicel: Lagrangian points, I like it how you can see that...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:16:15 -0600

saborunicel:

Lagrangian points, I like it how you can see that the center of gravity isn’t at the center of the star.

kqedscience: 10 Badass Quotes From Former Astronaut Sally...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:15:19 -0600

kqedscience:

10 Badass Quotes From Former Astronaut Sally Ride

(via Mashable)

the-science-llama: Wave at SaturnWho wants to be in the world’s...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:13:39 -0600

the-science-llama:

Wave at Saturn
Who wants to be in the world’s biggest class picture?
On July 19, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will take a picture of Earth from nearly 900 million miles away.

Cassini will start obtaining the Earth part of the mosaic at 2:27 p.m. PDT (5:27 p.m. EDT or 21:27 UTC) and end about 15 minutes later, all while Saturn is eclipsing the sun from Cassini’s point of view.

A simulated view from the Cassini spacecraft when it will take the photo

thescienceofreality: Cassini Probe to Take Photo of Earth From...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:51:13 -0600

thescienceofreality:

Cassini Probe to Take Photo of Earth From Deep Space

[Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech]

“NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, now exploring Saturn, will take a picture of our home planet from a distance of hundreds of millions of miles on July 19. NASA is inviting the public to help acknowledge the historic interplanetary portrait as it is being taken.

Earth will appear as a small, pale blue dot between the rings of Saturn in the image, which will be part of a mosaic, or multi-image portrait, of the Saturn system Cassini is composing.

“While Earth will be only about a pixel in size from Cassini’s vantage point 898 million [1.44 billion kilometers] away, the team is looking forward to giving the world a chance to see what their home looks like from Saturn,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “We hope you’ll join us in waving at Saturn from Earth, so we can commemorate this special opportunity.”

Cassini will start obtaining the Earth part of the mosaic at 2:27 p.m. PDT (5:27 p.m. EDT or 21:27 UTC) and end about 15 minutes later, all while Saturn is eclipsing the sun from Cassini’s point of view. The spacecraft’s unique vantage point in Saturn’s shadow will provide a special scientific opportunity to look at the planet’s rings. At the time of the photo, North America and part of the Atlantic Ocean will be in sunlight.

Unlike two previous Cassini eclipse mosaics of the Saturn system in 2006, which captured Earth, and another in 2012, the July 19 image will be the first to capture the Saturn system with Earth in natural color, as human eyes would see it. It also will be the first to capture Earth and its moon with Cassini’s highest-resolution camera. The probe’s position will allow it to turn its cameras in the direction of the sun, where Earth will be, without damaging the spacecraft’s sensitive detectors.”

Continue reading…

To learn more about the public outreach activities associated with the taking of the image, visit:http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/waveatsaturn .

For more information about Cassini, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

spaceplasma: Color Variation Across Rhea and Dione The cratered...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:38:00 -0600

spaceplasma:

Color Variation Across Rhea and Dione

The cratered ice moons Rhea and Dione come alive with vibrant color that reveals new information about their surface properties.

To create these false-color views, ultraviolet, green and infrared images were combined into a single black and white picture that isolates and maps regional color differences. This “color map” was then superposed over a clear-filter image of each moon.

The combination of color map and brightness image shows how the colors vary across the moon’s surface in relation to geologic features. The origin of the color differences is not yet understood, but may be caused by subtle differences in the surface composition or the sizes of grains making up the icy soil.

The images have not been scaled to show the moons’ proper relative sizes.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

vanehwasreal: Captain Picard: Ambassador, your logic escapes...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:05:05 -0600

vanehwasreal:

Captain Picard: Ambassador, your logic escapes me. If I didn’t know better, I would say that your judgment is influenced by your emotions.

Ambassador Spock: You speak as my father would if he were here, Picard.

humanisticscience: Magdalenian Girl Currently on display at The...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:16:15 -0600

humanisticscience:

Magdalenian Girl

Currently on display at The Field Museum, this is the name given to an anatomically modern human dating from the Magdalenian period. Although she is commonly known as the Magdalenian Girl, evidence suggests that she is more likely 25-30 years old, with some researchers placing her at age 35. Early researchers initially thought that she was much younger than that because her wisdom teeth had not ruptured, but new research suggests she is older than originally thought because of epiphyseal fusions of the femurs.

Unfortunately, she was discovered when a worker hit her skull with a pickaxe. This greatly damaged her skull and the black you see on her skull is a reconstruction that early researchers fused to the bone.

At the time that Magdalenian Girl was discovered, researchers believed that homo neanderthalensis was the direct ancestor to anatomically modern humans, and so when they reconstructed her skull they gave her Neanderthal features, which is incorrect. The reconstruction you see here was done by Elisabeth Daynès, who also did the most recent facial reconstruction of Tutankhamun.

Magdalenian Girl is currently on display at the Field Museum in their current exhibit Scenes from the Stone Age: The Cave Paintings of Lascaux. She is part of the museum’s permanent collection and is the most complete paleolithic skeleton in North America.

scienceisbeauty: Newton’s cannonball was a thought experiment...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 11:15:38 -0600

scienceisbeauty:

Newton’s cannonball was a thought experiment Isaac Newton used to hypothesize that the force of gravity was universal, and it was the key force for planetary motion. It appeared in his 1728 book A Treatise of the System of the World.

sirmitchell: “ :) “ One of four prints I’ll have at SPACE! The...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:34:44 -0600

sirmitchell:

“ :) “

One of four prints I’ll have at SPACE! The Gallery Show this Friday at Gallery 1988: WEST. Be there or be somewhere significantly less awesome.

ulaulaman: A View of Mercury From Afar This image of Mercury,...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:32:44 -0600

ulaulaman:

A View of Mercury From Afar

This image of Mercury, acquired by the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) aboard NASA’s MESSENGER mission on April 23, 2013, allows us to take a step back to view the planet. Prior to the MESSENGER mission, Mercury’s surface was often compared to the surface of Earth’s moon, when in fact, Mercury and the moon are very different. This image in particular highlights many basins near Mercury’s terminator, including Bach crater. Many craters with central peaks and the nearby bright rays of Han Kan crater are also evident.
Once per week, MDIS captures images of Mercury’s limb, with an emphasis on imaging the southern hemisphere limb. These limb images provide information about Mercury’s shape and complement measurements of topography made by the Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) of Mercury’s northern hemisphere.

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

"There is a time and place for decaf coffee. Never and in the trash."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:32:32 -0600

“There is a time and place for decaf coffee. Never and in the trash.”

- (via midwestraisedmidwestliving)

lovebeyondmeasure: Quick, messy graphic to explain a concept...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:19:13 -0600

lovebeyondmeasure:

Quick, messy graphic to explain a concept that seems obvious to me:

We shouldn’t be helping women because they’re related to someone else. We shouldn’t be helping women because someone else cares about them. We should be helping women because they are people.

We should be helping women for their own sake.

Why is that a hard concept for people to grasp?

thescienceofreality: Dim Star Becomes 7 Times Hotter in 160...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 20:20:58 -0600

thescienceofreality:

Dim Star Becomes 7 Times Hotter in 160 Seconds

Image Credit: Casey Reed/NASA.

“Talk about a celestial mood swing: Scientists using the SCORPIO camera of the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory recently watched as a low luminosity star suddenly burst to life in an extraordinarily short amount of time — becoming 15 times brighter in less than three minutes.

Star WX UMa, which is relatively close-by in the Ursa-major constellation, is about 15.6 light-years from Earth and is part of a binary system. It’s a flare star — a normally subdued low luminosity object that occassionally and unpredicably boosts its brightness and heat in a matter of seconds. But it’s an effect that doesn’t last long. The stars return back to their normal state in about 10 minutes.

Fascinatingly, the effect is so dramatic that the classification of the star literally changes within a few seconds. In this case, WX UMa temporarily transformed from spectral type M to B. Its temperature went from about 2,800 kelvin (K) to six or seven times that — somewhere between 10,000 to 33,000 K.

These flares happen when instability within the plasma of the star causes turbulence in its magnetic field.

“A magnetic reconnection then occurs, a conversion of energy from the magnetic field into kinetic energy, in order to recover the stability of the flow, much like what happens in an electric discharge,” said a researcher when speaking to SINC. This kinetic energy transforms into thermal energy in the upper layers of the atmosphere and the star’s corona, driving up its temperature and brightness.”

Read the entire study at Astrophysics: Spectral observations of flare stars in the neighborhood of the sun.

howstuffworks: The Top 10 Inventions of Sir Isaac Newton When...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:29:42 -0600

A telescope Newton built. Image via http://preview.tinyurl.com/d4hdjqr

One of Isaac Newton's notebooks. Image via http://preview.tinyurl.com/c22ksvo

howstuffworks:

The Top 10 Inventions of Sir Isaac Newton

When he wasn’t envisioning space cannons and figuring out what holds the universe together, Isaac Newton applied his considerable intellect to other problems — possibly including ways to keep the cat from scratching on the door.

Born the son of an uneducated farmer, Newton died a true polymath — a celebrated master of astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and theology. His many inventions, discoveries, and harebrained notions provide a glimpse into a legendary mind. Here are our 10 favorites.

Keep reading…

visualizingmath: Minimal Surface In mathematics, a minimal...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:24:55 -0600

visualizingmath:

Minimal Surface

In mathematics, a minimal surface is a surface that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having a mean curvature of zero. The term “minimal surface” is used because these surfaces originally arose as surfaces that minimized total surface area subject to some constraint. Physical models of area-minimizing minimal surfaces can be made by dipping a wire frame into a soap solution, forming a soap film, which is a minimal surface whose boundary is the wire frame. However the term is used for more general surfaces that may self-intersect or do not have constraints.

Art by Paul Nylander.

tastefullyoffensive: Purrito [laenova]

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:16:46 -0600

tastefullyoffensive:

Purrito [laenova]