10 Strange Things About The Universe Space The universe can be a very strange place. While groundbreaking ideas such as quantum theory, relativity and even the Earth going around the Sun might be commonly accepted now, science still continues to show that the universe contains things you might find it difficult to believe, and even more difficult to get your head around. Theoretically, the lowest temperature that can be achieved is absolute zero, exactly ? One of the properties of a negative-energy vacuum is that light actually travels faster in it than it does in a normal vacuum, something that may one day allow people to travel faster than the speed of light in a kind of negative-energy vacuum bubble. One prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity is that when a large object moves, it drags the space-time around it, causing nearby objects to be pulled along as well. Relativity of Simultaneity Since this extra dimension is so small, only tiny objects, such as particles, can move along it. Antimatter Retrocausality
Introduction to Social Influence, Persuasion, Compliance & Propaganda This portion of the Working Psychology website offers a brief introduction to a big topic: social influence, the modern, scientific study of persuasion, compliance, propaganda, "brainwashing," and the ethics that surround these issues. Although these topics aren't always simple (it is, after all, science), I've done my best to make this introduction interesting. Since Aristotle recorded his principles of persuasion in Rhetoric, humans have attempted to define and refine the principles of successful influence. Persuasion has been studied as an art for most of human history. The comparatively young science of social influence, however, can trace its roots to the second world war, when a social psychologist named Carl Hovland was contracted by the U.S. Social scientists attempt to support any assertion with facts. Want a few examples of how social influence works in the real world before you continue? Copyright © 2002 by Kelton Rhoads, Ph.D.
Scientists twist light to send data: Beams of light can be twisted and combined to transmit data dramatically faster A multi-national team led by USC with researchers hailing from the U.S., China, Pakistan and Israel has developed a system of transmitting data using twisted beams of light at ultra-high speeds -- up to 2.56 terabits per second. To put that in perspective, broadband cable (which you probably used to download this) supports up to about 30 megabits per second. The twisted-light system transmits more than 85,000 times more data per second. Their work might be used to build high-speed satellite communication links, short free-space terrestrial links, or potentially be adapted for use in the fiber optic cables that are used by some Internet service providers. "You're able to do things with light that you can't do with electricity," said Alan Willner, electrical engineering professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the corresponding author of an article about the research that was published in Nature Photonics on June 24.
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel - A tediously accurate map of the solar system Mercury Venus Earth You Are Here Moon Mars Jupiter Io Europa Ganymede Callisto Saturn Titan Uranus Neptune Pluto(we still love you) That was about 10 million km (6,213,710 mi) just now. Pretty empty out here. Here comes our first planet... As it turns out, things are pretty far apart. We’ll be coming up on a new planet soon. Most of space is just space. Halfway home. Destination: Mars! It would take about seven months to travel this distance in a spaceship. Sit back and relax. When are we gonna be there? Seriously. This is where we might at least see some asteroids to wake us up. I spy, with my little eye... something black. If you were on a road trip, driving at 75mi/hr, it would have taken you over 500 years to get here from earth. All these distances are just averages, mind you. If you plan it right, you can actually move relatively quickly between planets. Pretty close to Jupiter now. Sorry. Lots of time to think out here... Pop the champagne! We're always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers.
Losing the Language of Happiness If you haven’t read Daniel Everertt’s fabulous Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes about his work as a linguist in the Amazon—well, stop whatever you are doing, go directly to Amazon and enjoy. After 30 years living with and studying the Piraha, a tribe living in the Amazonian basin, Everett has concluded that neither Chomsky’s argument—that language is innate to humans and there are universal laws of grammar—and Skinner’s argument—that language is completely learned and genetics account for nothing—are correct. Instead, Everett posits that language and culture are completely intertwined and you cannot study one without the other. Furthermore, and this is where things get really interesting, Everett believes that grammar is significantly less important than culture-based meanings and constraints on talking” are the key. So what’s the big deal? Those 2000 bits are what we call conscious reality. Some of this is straight up anatomy. And right now, this is a critical bit of information.
Animations Animation:Angular diameter distance scaling with curvature and lambda (&OmegaK=1-&Omegam-&Omega&Lambda, fixed &Omegamh2 and &Omegabh2) The Neuroscience Behind Increasing Your Intellect I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better. ~Maya Angelou The great debate on intelligence is a long and complicated one and for centuries people have tried to discover how to increase their very own intellect. But now because of the great advances in neuroscience on intelligence, psychologists have discovered multiple ways to incur neurogenesis or the growing of one’s brain cells. The History of Neurogenesis Explained Not long ago, scientists and the mass opinion of growing new brain cells was that it simply does not happen. During the 1970s Michael Kaplan was conducting research on baby rats and how they grew brain cells. But that’s where Michael Kaplan’s got interesting — he found out that it’s not the mature brain cells replicating. So How Exactly Do We Increase Intellect? After Michael Kaplan published 19 scientific papers into his findings, scientists didn’t agree on the fact that neurogenesis occurs into the 1990s. Practical Ways To Getting Smarter
7 Man-Made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics Odds are pretty good that some of you are reading this on an LCD screen while the rest of us are trying to make it out on the 13-inch monochrome monitor that came with our garage sale Commodore 64. But even with the LCD, some laptops still weigh over 10-pounds. And while that doesn't seem like much, the level of muscle atrophy experienced by the average Warcraft addict makes that weight a thousand times heavier. However, elastic conductors could fix that and make smuggling your porn collection into church even easier. Also, oooohhh. Elastic conductors are made of "ionic liquid" mixed with carbon nanotubes. What the Hell is it Used For? In addition to making screens that can be rolled up and stuck in our back pocket, a lot of scientists and doctors want to use elastic conductors to make flexible-lensed cameras... to be fitted to the back of the eyeball. A non-Newtonian liquid, in practical terms, is a liquid that turns solid when sufficient stress is applied. Also, something with lasers.
The Scientific Explanation As To Why Matter Is Simply An Illusion Niels Bohr, a Danish Physicist who made significant contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory once said: “if quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.” Quantum physics has left scientists all over the world baffled, especially with the discovery that our physical material reality, isn’t really physical at all. “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” It seems philosophers of our ancient past were right, our senses really do deceive us. Again, our physical material reality really ISN’T physical at all. Scientific understandings change continuously throughout human history. The notion that the atom was the smallest particle in the universe fell with the discovery that the atom itself is made up of even smaller, subatomic elements. At the turn of the ninetieth century, physicists started to explore the relationship between energy and the structure of matter. What Does This Mean? Sources:
ReadySet Go: How A Simple Solar Power Pack Is Driving Wealth In The Developing World | Gadget Lab The ReadySet power station. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired Last week, a peculiar little box called ReadySet blew up on Kickstarter. It blasted past its fundraising goal in just a day, but while it’s new here in the States, it’s been juicing phones, laptops and even lightbulbs by the thousands in Africa for more than a year. Encased in plastic, ReadySet is about the size of a shoe box, and it stores 54 watt-hours of power in its field-ready battery pack. On the back side, positive and negative terminals let it connect to just about any power-generation source. For thousands of Africans, it is nothing less than a light in the darkness. San Francisco-based Fenix International, the company behind the ReadySet, had its roots in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. “When we were working on that $100 laptop, we realized that the way most people in the developing world go online would be to leapfrog [over laptops] with phones and smartphones,” Lin told Wired. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired
Edad del Universo La edad del Universo, de acuerdo con la Teoría del Big Bang, es el tiempo transcurrido desde el Big Bang hasta el presente. El consenso de los científicos contemporáneos es de unos 13,798 ± 0,037 miles de millones de años,[1] es decir que la edad del universo está comprendida entre 13.761 y 13.835 millones de años. En la ciencia moderna el modelo más prudente (y ampliamente aceptado) de la formación del Universo es el Big Bang. Hay siempre una ambigüedad en la relatividad especial y la relatividad general definiendo de forma precisa que se entiende por tiempo entre dos eventos. ) que aparece en la métrica. Edad basada en los resultados del WMAP[editar] El proyecto WMAP de la NASA estimó la edad del Universo en: (13,7 ± 0,2) × 109 años. Esto es, el Universo tiene unos 13.700 millones de años,[2] con una incertidumbre de 200 millones de años. Edad como función de parámetros cosmológicos[editar] . y . son los más importantes. con la materia total del Universo. donde la función . . .
Sentient Developments: Ranking the most powerful forces in the Universe There are a large number of forces at work in the Universe, some more powerful than others -- and I'm not talking about the four fundamental forces of nature. A force in the context I'm talking about is any phenomenon in Universe that exhibits a powerful effect or influence on its environment. Many of these phenomenon quite obviously depend on the four basic forces to function (gravity, electromagnetism, the weak interaction and the strong interaction), but it's the collective and emergent effects of these fundamental forces that I'm interested in. And when I say power I don't just mean the capacity to destroy or wreak havoc, though that's an important criteria. A force should also be considered powerful if it can profoundly reorganize or manipulate its environment in a coherent or constructive way. Albert Einstein once quipped that the most powerful force in the Universe was compound interest. 4. Black holes can also vary in size and gravitational intensity. That's a lot of pull. 3. 2.