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aamukherjee Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Hymn To The Sea -
epistemophobiarunsdeep Falling Over Myself. -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
ikenbot cwl -
pieceinthepuzzlehumanity This Is The Right One -
project-argus Hello, Universe. -
torgothegreat God Delusion
Why Is That Undulating Blob Of Flesh Inspecting My Oil Drill?
Every so often, the Internet astonishes. Things I wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t expect, sometimes happen. Take this, for example. On April 25, somewhere in the ocean off Great Britain, a remotely operated video camera mounted near a deep sea oil drill caught a glimpse — at first it was just a glimpse — of an astonishing looking sea creature. It was a green-gray blob of gelatinous muscle, covered with a finely mesh-like textured skin, no eyes, no tentacles, no front, no back. It moved constantly, floating up to the drill, then it backed off and disappeared. The camera operator tried to find it, and then, suddenly, out of the darkness, back it came. What was this thing?
That is truly incredible.
ikenbotWatch How Life Recovers from Devastation
If a portion of Earth underwent a major cataclysm, how long would it take for life to recover?
The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens is giving scientists an unprecedented opportunity to witness a recovery from devastation, as the eruption leveled the surrounding forest, blasted away hundreds of meters of the mountain’s summit, and claimed 57 human lives.
Landsat satellites have tracked what has happened on the mountain, and how the forest was reclaimed — all on its own.
(via wespeakfortheearth)
3500 mirrors of the Mont-Louis solar furnace, the first solar furnace in the world. In: LIFE Science Library - The engineer by C. C. Furnas, Joe McCarty and the Editors of TIME - LIFE BOOKS (hungarian edition by Műszaki Könyvkiadó,1972).
Girl speaking into a Chromalizer, from The Mind, a LIFE Science Library Book, by John Rowan Wilson and the Editors of TIME-LIFE Books. (1964, reprinted in 1971).
“The colored panels tell her visually when she is making the right sound.”
Albert Einstein with an Albert Einstein puppet.
expose-the-light
John Glenn on the cover of Life magazine, February 2, 1962
The photo, a portrait of Glenn in his space helmet, appeared on Life’s February 2, 1962 issue — 50 years ago this week. It wasn’t until 9:47 am EST on February 20, after a number of delays, that Glenn’s “Friendship 7” Mercury space capsule was thrown into space atop a new Atlas rocket. When he returned to Earth four hours, fifty-five minutes, and twenty-three seconds later, Glenn was the greatest American aviation hero since Charles Lindbergh.
The umbrella mouth gulper eel (eurypharynx pelecanoides)
can open its “umbrella mouth” to pelican-like proportion, accommodating prey much larger than its size. Plus it can stretch and expand its stomach! The eel itself can be almost one meter in length, and if it starts expanding… This means it can swallow and devour something more than 1.5 meters long (keep your favorite cat away from it)
(via gastornis)
crownedrose
Gigantic Radio Telescope to Search for First Stars, Galaxies & Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Image: This image from LOFAR shows plasma jets from the black hole that stretch 2,000 light-years from the core of Cygnus A. Credit: J. McKean and M. Wise, ASTRON
More than 20,000 radio antennas will soon connect over the Internet to scan largely unexplored radio frequencies, hunting for the first stars and galaxies and potentially signals of extraterrestrial intelligence.
The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) will consist of banks of antennas in 48 stations in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, all hooked up by fiber optic cables. Signals from these stations will be combined using a supercomputer, transforming the array into “perhaps the most complex and versatile radio telescope ever attempted,” said Heino Falcke, chairman of the board for the International LOFAR Telescope.
Currently 16,000 of LOFAR’s antennas and 41 of its stations are up, and the array will be completed by the middle of this year. All told, LOFAR will have a resolution equivalent to a telescope 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter. In addition, “it’s an expandable design — we can always come along later and add additional stations,” said Michael Wise at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.
Since LOFAR is so large, it can scan large parts of the heavens — its first all-sky survey, which started Jan. 9, can sweep across “the entire northern sky twice in just 45 days,” said George Heald of ASTRON.
Can’t wait to see the data things operation churns up!
Life Discovered On Dead Hydrothermal Vents
Scientists at USC have uncovered evidence that even when hydrothermal sea vents go dormant and their blistering warmth turns to frigid cold, life goes on.
Or rather, it is replaced.
A team led by USC microbiologist Katrina Edwards found that the microbes that thrive on hot fluid methane and sulfur spewed by active hydrothermal vents are supplanted, once the vents go cold, by microbes that feed on the solid iron and sulfur that make up the vents themselves.
The findings — based on samples collected for Edwards by the U.S. Navy deep sea submersible Alvin (famed for its exploration of the Titanic in 1986) — provide a rare example of ecological succession in microbes.
The findings were published in an mBio article authored by Edwards, USC postdoctoral researcher Jason Sylvan and Brandy Toner of the University of Minnesota.
Ecological succession is the biological phenomenon whereby one form of life takes the place of another as conditions in an area change — a phenomenon documented in plants and animals.
cwnl:
Hunt for Exomoon Around Alien Planets is On
Side Note: Remember last night’s question about moons having moons of their own? As it turns out, new research may suggest the possibility of moons also having life of their own in recent exoplanet and exomoons simulations as implied in this SPACE article.
Imaged Above: According to the Planetary Habitability Laboratory’s recently released periodic table of exoplanets, 16 warm Neptunes and 96 warm Jovians lay within their star’s habitable zone. If they managed to capture rocky Earth-sized moons on their journey inward, such moons would be able to hold liquid water, and be potential wells of life. Credit: PHL
While astronomers continue to search for potentially habitable alien planets, they’re expanding the hunt to include moons that could host life as well.
Three new computer simulations may help researchers identify rocky satellites beyond our solar system that could harbor water on their surfaces, if their parent planets circle close enough to their stars.
When scientists working with NASA’s Kepler space telescope announced the discovery of 1,235 planetary candidates in February 2011, the list included 37 Neptune-sized planets and 10 Jupiter-sized planets within their star’s habitable zones — the region of space where water can exist as a liquid on a rocky planet. Though gas giants would not boast liquid water on their surface, their moons might.
According to David Kipping, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a good-size rocky moon at the right distance from its star “ticks all the boxes for our wish list of habitable conditions.”
Kipping, one of the members of the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler team, authored and utilized one of three computer simulations designed to help astronomers pick such an “exomoon” out of the spacecraft’s data.
(via ikenbot)
Sea Slug Offers Clues to Improving Long-Term Memory
Using sea slugs as models, scientists someday may be able to design learning protocols that improve long-term memory formation in humans, a new study suggests.
The researchers used information about biochemical pathways in the brain of the sea slug Aplysia to design a computer model that identified the times when the mollusk’s brain is primed for learning. They tested the model by submitting the animals to a series of training sessions, involving electric shocks, and found that Aplysia experienced a significant increase in memory formation when the sessions were conducted during the peak periods predicted by the model.
The proof-of-principle study may someday help scientists discover ways to improve human memory, the researchers said.
“This is very impressive,” David Glanzman, a neurobiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, said of the study, in which he was not involved. “If someone had asked me ahead of time, ‘Are you going to be able to improve learning if you model these two pathways?’ I would have predicted no.”
I think this is one of the more beautiful theories in (non-physics) science. Basically: things in cells used to be other independent living things.
From Wikipedia:
The endosymbiotic theory concerns the mitochondria, plastids (e.g. chloroplasts), and possibly other organelles of eukaryotic cells. According to this theory, certain organelles originated as free-living bacteria that were taken inside another cell as endosymbionts. Mitochondria developed from proteobacteria (in particular,Rickettsiales, the SAR11 clade,[1][2] or close relatives) and chloroplasts from cyanobacteria.
The extreme of this theory is a theory known as Symbiogenesis:
Symbiogenesis is the merging of two separate organisms to form a single new organism. The idea originated with Konstantin Mereschkowsky in his 1926 book Symbiogenesis and the Origin of Species, which proposed that chloroplasts originate from cyanobacteria captured by a protozoan…
A fundamental principle of modern evolutionary theory is that mutations arise one at a time and either spread through the population or not, depending on whether they offer an individual fitness advantage. Nevertheless, this general case may not apply to all examples of evolutionary change. Indeed, genome mapping techniques have revealed that family trees of the major taxa appear to be extensively cross-linked—possibly due to lateral gene transfer.
