The Moon is Shrinking, Like a Wrinkled Apple. The moon is a permanent feature in our skies, but is it as unchanging as it seems? Scientists consider the Earth’s only natural satellite to be a pristine environment, an “open book” where the history of the solar system is written. But according to new observations by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), there’s more than just impact craters — born from the violent early days of our developing star system — written in the lunar landscape. Reported in a new paper set for publication in the Aug. 20 issue of the journal Science, previously undetected landforms have been spotted by the LRO’s high resolution camera.
These landforms are known as “lobate scarps” and were first identified in photographs taken by the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions. However, the lobate scarps seen in these early missions appeared to be clustered around the equatorial regions. Lobate scarps are raised features approximately 9 meters high by several kilometers long that form along thrust faults.
Future bio-nanotechnology will use computer chips inside living cells. 12 Events That Will Change Everything, Made Interactive. 6 Future Mods for Our Minds and Bodies. Injection-Mold Custom Organs Fab@Home machine. Medical researchers are already growing human tissues, and even organs, in the lab. Then there's Lawrence Bonassar. The assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University is producing custom body parts using Fab@Home, a 3D lithography platform developed at Cornell. (Its inventors won a 2007 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award.) Breed Super-Rice to Feed the World Genetic engineer Pamela Ronald, photographed for Popular Mechanics on April 14, 2009. Pamela Ronald is a genetic engineer with little patience for debates over "frankenfoods. " Researchers now plan to develop rice strains that need less moisture and fertilizer, can fight off destructive microbes and can thrive in saltier conditions.
Replace Suture Kits With Lasers Katzir's laser bonding is similar to Star Trek's dermal regenerator. Lasers could replace old-fashioned needles and thread for suturing wounds and surgical incisions. Mind-Meld With Machines Smart pill. How to Make Water Explode. That "how to boil water" video is painful, very very painful to watch... Nice article, Esther. One mistake, though... "Anyone who has wandered through a crowd knows that it's easier to get pushed away from the edge than it is to fight their way out from the middle. This is because the pressure from the people around them keeps them from getting the space they need to push their way out. " The conclusion is correct, but the explanation is not. The reason why it's easier to get pushed away from the edges is simply a geometrical one. When you're in the middle, people push you from all sides, so you kinda stay in the middle.
The same is true of water molecules, except that water molecules also attract one another (in the liquid state) so, even at the very edge (the surface), not every molecule escapes because they're attracted to the molecules farther in. I would like to add something else. All phase transitions occur at a very specific set of conditions. Here's a cool video of that happening: Here They Are, Science's 10 Most Beautiful Experiments. Whether they are blasting apart subatomic particles in accelerators, sequencing the genome or analyzing the wobble of a distant star, the experiments that grab the world's attention often cost millions of dollars to execute and produce torrents of data to be processed over months by supercomputers.
Some research groups have grown to the size of small companies. But ultimately science comes down to the individual mind grappling with something mysterious. When Robert P. Crease, a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory, recently asked physicists to nominate the most beautiful experiment of all time, the 10 winners were largely solo performances, involving at most a few assistants. Most of the experiments -- which are listed in this month's Physics World -- took place on tabletops and none required more computational power than that of a slide rule or calculator. The rest was just geometry. Kanał użytkownika NurdRage. Planet debate gets greater. So just how many planets are there in our solar system anyway? Eight? Nine? Thirteen? Or thousands? The planethood question got more interesting this week with the naming of yet another dwarf planet, Haumea.
The football-shaped world was found by Caltech astronomer Michael Brown just after Christmas 2004 (which prompted its initial, unofficial nickname: "Santa"). The controversy came to a head in 2005 when Brown's team found the object now known as Eris - a world like Pluto, only bigger and farther out. The Great Planet Debate has been simmering ever since. Scientist (and parent) sees 'teaching moment'The education angle literally hit home for planetary scientist Alan Stern - and not just because he's the principal scientific investigator for New Horizons. "My own son was told by a teacher that an answer was wrong on a test about Pluto," Stern told me last week. "It was clear at the end of the two and a half days that there was no consensus," he said.
Inside the weird world of terahertz radiation. I work in optics, so when I'm in grant-writing mode, optics and lasers seem to be the best technology choice for every problem, including powering coffee machines. But in the part of the multiverse called reality, lasers aren't always ideal. This becomes particularly true when we move to longer wavelengths; terahertz radiation (basically, heat), in particular, which has wavelengths at around 0.1mm, is best described as painful to work with. Part of the reason for this is that the sources for THz radiation are, well, unfriendly. They are either really bulky, or so small that they emit their radiation everywhere, making it impossible to collect efficiently. Why are researchers interested in making coherent heat? For instance, a drug tablet is mostly transparent, but each of the different layers generates a small reflection, so the internal structure of the tablet can be imaged.
But all of these require either a large amount of radiation, or that the radiation is coherent. Quantum cascades. Kirlian Photography - Building your own equipment. What is Kirlian Photography? Kirlian photography is a high voltage, contact print photography. Kirlian photography is named after Semyon Davidovich Kirlian and his wife Valentina who began their work with high voltage photography in 1939. Kirlian collaborated with his wife for over 30 years developing equipment and studying electro-photography. Kirlian's work was first made known to the general public in this country by a book published in 1970 by Shelia Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder titled "Psychic discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain".
Kirlian work became so well know that the field of high voltage electro-photography is called Kirlian Photography. Although Kirlian wasn't the first to study electro-photography. The process is simple. The Kirlian process, being a contact print process, doesn't require the use of a camera or lens. Figure 1 One must keep in mind that most observable Kirlian phenomena does not require any paranormal or bio-plasma field to be explained. Myths about the "love hormone" oxytocin that could ruin your love life. My opinion is that when we consider the last century of research in the social sciences* and the physical sciences that impinge on them** , the conclusion seems to be that humans have been shaped by blind forces in evolution to be the most culturally diverse animal on the planet.
Our brains are structured to make us staggeringly flexible. To go way out on a limb here, I think we have all these contradictory urges inside our minds because their turmoil keeps us busy and always changing, and thus able to best fill the niche in the ecosystem we occupy: the most cultural animal. But ignore that because it smacks of tautological circularity. Anyway, this makes the social sciences the hardest sciences around because we are so culturally mutable that it's extremely difficult to make generalizations about what our behavior should be. * Anthropology, psychology, economics, linguistics, etc. ** Neurology, evolutionary biology, medicine, neurochemistry, ethology, etc.