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aamukherjee A Slice of Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Fading Like A Dead Star -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
ikenbot CWL -
abluegirl A Blue Girl -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
The correlation between peak song activity and peak egg-laying, from a fascinating BBC documentary on why birds sing.
ikenbot
One of my favorite illustrative representations of how the fabric of space time behaves.
Wonders of the Universe: Stardust
Spectroscopy of Stars. How to tell which stars are made of what.
Credit: BBC2
(via ikenbot)
Crazy Science Jobs #342: Volcanologist
If I were to make a list of “Hazardous Work Environments” that one might choose to partake in scientific research, a portal to the molten mantle of our planet might be near the top of that list. Probably right below “cloned velociraptor nursery” and above “San Andreas nitroglycerine factory”.
This clip from BBC’s “Journey to the Center of the Planet” shows a suicidal brave volcanologist venturing to the edge of a 2000 foot lava lake in Africa’s Nyiragongo volcano to collect a sample. The lava from this volcano has been clocked at 60 mph. Less than a month after this video was shot, the volcano erupted and emptied all of that burning hot death in less than an hour.
I’ll stick to the biology and leave the liquid molten rivers of deadly lava to others.
(via Boing Boing)
It uses the strange “quantum states” of matter to perform calculations in a way that, if scaled up, could vastly outperform conventional computers.
The 6mm-by-6mm chip holds nine quantum devices, among them four “quantum bits” that do the calculations.
The team said further scaling up to 10 qubits should be possible this year.
Rather than the ones and zeroes of digital computing, quantum computers deal in what are known as superpositions - states of matter that can be thought of as both one and zero at once.
pieceinthepuzzlehumanity-deactiDavid Attenborough - Wonderful World - in spoken word.
Everything is amazing, and when we learn about it it only becomes more so.
(by CopterVideo, h/t Ed Yong)
(via jtotheizzoe)
