Accelerating Future » 10 Interesting Futuristic Materials. 1.
Aerogel Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, including "best insulator", and "lowest-density solid". Sometimes called "frozen smoke", aerogel is made by the supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It's 99.8% empty space, which makes it look semi-transparent. Aerogel is a fantastic insulator -- if you had a shield of aerogel, you could easily defend yourself from a flamethrower. 2. Carbon nanotubes are chains of carbon held together by the strongest bond in all chemistry, the sacred sp2 bond, even stronger than the sp3 bonds that hold together diamond. 3. Sixty Amazing But True Facts!!! Awesome milk trick!. - StumbleUpon.
NASA OKs Feb. launch of private space station trip. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
(AP) — A private California company will attempt the first-ever commercial cargo run to the International Space Station in February. NASA announced the news Friday, one year and one day after Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, became the first private business to launch a capsule into orbit and return it safely to Earth. On Feb. 7, SpaceX will attempt another orbital flight from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. This time, the unmanned Dragon capsule will fly to the space station and dock with a load of supplies. NASA stressed it is a target date. "Pending all the final safety reviews and testing, SpaceX will send its Dragon spacecraft to rendezvous with the International Space Station in less than two months," said NASA's No. 2, deputy administrator Lori Garver. NASA has turned to industry to help stock the space station now that the space shuttles are retired, investing hundreds of millions of dollars in this startup effort.
Online: NASA: SpaceX: Asteroid Crash May Explain Mercury's Strange Spin. A collision with an asteroid might have set the planet Mercury whirling oddly in its orbit, a new study suggests.
When one body orbits another — say, a moon around a planet or a planet around a star — the orbiting body often spins. Our planet experiences day and night because it spins on its axis, regularly changing which side it exposes to the sun. Mysterious planet-sized object spotted near Mercury. A mysterious object is seen following in Mercury's path Is a giant, cloaked spaceship orbiting around Mercury?
That's been the speculation from some corners aftera camera onboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft caught a wave of electronically charged material shooting out from the sun and hitting Mercury. Theorists have seized on the images captured from the "coronal mass ejection" (CME) last week as suggestive of alien life hanging out in our own cosmic backyard. Earth, Meet Your Long-Lost Sibling: The Christmas Planet. It may sound like something from a very special episode of Doctor Who, but the Christmas planet is real.
What's more, it's the most Earth-like world yet discovered. The planet, more properly known as Kepler 22-b, was revealed to the world Monday via a press conference at NASA Ames Research Center. Don Harper Mills: 1994's Most Bizarre Suicide. Most Amazing Time Lapse Video of Milky Way Ever Made. Seriously. The Big Chandra Picture. The Big Chandra Picture In more than a decade of operation, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has transformed our view of the high-energy Universe with its ability to make exquisite X-ray images of star clusters, supernova remnants, galactic eruptions, and collisions between clusters of galaxies.
As Chandra expands the realm of the known, it continues to raise new questions and point the way for future exploration. This photo blog presents some of Chandra's most spectacular images in a large and shareable format. Follow Chandra on Twitter 10 Apr 2014. Thermal Physics Jokes.
Match Stick Rocket. Match Stick Rocket SUBJECT: Rocketry TOPIC: Propulsion DESCRIPTION: A small solid propellant rocket is made from a match and a piece of aluminum foil.
CONTRIBUTED BY: Steve Culivan, KSC EDITED BY: Roger Storm, NASA Glenn Research Center 2 match book matches or wooden stick matches Small square of aluminum foil Paper clip Safety pin Take one match and wrap a small piece of aluminum foil around the match-head. Scientists find monster black holes, biggest yet. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
(AP) — Scientists have found the biggest black holes known to exist — each one 10 billion times the mass of our sun. A team led by astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered the two gigantic black holes in clusters of elliptical galaxies more than 300 million light years away. That's relatively close on the galactic scale. "They are monstrous," Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma told reporters. "We did not expect to find such massive black holes because they are more massive than indicated by their galaxy properties. The previous black hole record-holder is as large as 6 billion suns. In research released Monday by the journal Nature, the scientists suggest these black holes may be the leftovers of quasars that crammed the early universe. Black holes are objects so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape.