oceans of space and time

just came from the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, which was held last week.

gotta say, everyone there was amazing.  out of everyone I talked to in my category, I was particularly impressed by one guy from Canada (Adam Noble I believe his name was) who figured out a way to concentrate nanosilver particles in wastewater using Euglena.  his retrieval process could possibly make him millions.  I thought it was awesome a fellow senior was doing awesome work like that.

of course, the grand award winner was pretty cool too (didn’t get to meet him though).  he was funny, he was so excited to win any award that he would run up stage, mouth wide open, gasping for air.  I cheered really hard when he won anything, he was cool and I loved him just for being so excited.  his name is Jack Andraka, he did a project on detection of pancreatic cancer using nanotubes.  he made a dip-stick sensor that is way more accurate than stuff out there now.  and he’s 15.  pretty awesome. :)

n-a-s-a:

Orcus of the Outer Solar System

Credit: M. Brown (Caltech), C. Trujillo (Gemini), D. Rabinowitz (Yale), Samuel Oschin Telescope 

fuckyeahspaceexploration:

Concept art for JAXA’s solar sail IKAROS probe. IKAROS, launched in 2010, was the first craft to demonstrate solar sail technology. Pictured, IKAROS unfurls its sail in a shuriken-like fashion.

super nerdy on several levels… xD

(via halfway-to-infinity)

From Wikipedia:

The Kola Superdeep Borehole (Russian: Кольская сверхглубокая скважина) (Transliteration: Kolskaya sverkhglubokaya skvazhina) is the result of a scientific drilling project of the Soviet Union on the Kola Peninsula. The project attempted to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust.

THEY DRILLED A REALLY DEEP HOLE IN THE GROUND.

Why?

BECAUSE THEY COULD

science:

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Here’s what Erwin Schrödinger actually wrote in 1935, translated from the German:

That it is in fact not impossible to express the degree and kind of blurring of all variables in one perfectly clear concept follows at once from the fact that Q.M. as a matter of fact has and uses such an instrument, the so-called wave function or psi-function, also called system vector. Much more is to be said about it further on. That it is an abstract, unintuitive mathematical construct is a scruple that almost always surfaces against new aids to thought and that carries no great message. At all events it is an imagined entity that images the blurring of all variables at every moment just as clearly and faithfully as does the classical model its sharp numerical values. Its equation of motion too, the law of its time variation, so long as the system is left undisturbed, lags not one iota, in clarity and determinacy, behind the equations of motion of the classical model. So the latter could be straight-forwardly replaced by the psi-function, so long as the blurring is confined to atomic scale, not open to direct control. In fact the function has provided quite intuitive and convenient ideas, for instance the “cloud of negative electricity” around the nucleus, etc. But serious misgivings arise if one notices that the uncertainty affects macroscopically tangible and visible things, for which the term “blurring” seems simply wrong. (…)

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

jtotheizzoe:

Martian desert sinkhole or pigmented fibrovascular tissue of the human iris?

You be the judge.

(via Gurney Journey)

(via fizixwhiz)

thenewenlightenmentage:

Hey, Who Ripped Open a Hole in the Universe?

This eerie patch of blackness in the middle of a busy star cluster may look like a rather misshapen black hole, but it’s actually something even stranger. It’s also quite possibly the loneliest, darkest, coldest place in the entire cosmos.

This is Barnard 68, and it’s what’s known as a dark molecular cloud. Basically, the dust and gas that makes up Barnard 68 is so tightly packed together that it blocks out all the light behind it. The result might look like some alien civilization tore apart the fabric of the universe and opening up a gateway to the howling void, but thankfully - or unfortunately, I guess, depending on how you feel about the howling void - it’s just gas. Make that a lot of gas.

Here’s some additional info on this particular patch of darkness:

Read More

(via cumberblank)

karmaplus:

“Our story is the story of the universe. Every piece of everyone, of everything you love and everything you hate, of the thing you hold most precious, was assembled by the forces of nature in the first few minutes of the life of the universe, transformed in the hearts of the stars or created in their fiery deaths.

And when you die, those pieces will be returned to the universe in the endless cycle of death and rebirth. What a wonderful thing it is to be part of that universe. And what a story, what a majestic story.”

Professor Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe.

(via sanityscraps)

science:

Synthetically grown bismuth crystals. (pic 1, pic 2). Naturally occurring bismuth looks visually uninteresting, but you can grow these colorful, hoppered crystals in the lab. In fact, since bismuth melts at 271 °C, you can make them at home. The colorful exterior is formed when the outside is exposed to air and oxidized; the color varies with the thickness of the oxide layer. The crystal grows faster at the edges than the interior, giving this hollowed-out look.

Bismuth was long thought to be heaviest stable element; as it turns out, Bi is ever so slightly radioactive, but its half-life is a billion times the age of the universe.

(via tanya77)

freshphotons:

Lego model of The Large Hadron Collider, Via Reddit.

(via ziriam)