Discover Magazine dark matter Your hands are, roughly speaking, 360 million years old. Before then, they were fins, which your fishy ancestors used to swim through oceans and rivers. Once those fins sprouted digits, they could propel your salamander-like ancestors across dry land. Fast forward 300 million years, and your hands had become fine-tuned for manipulations: your lemur-like ancestors used them to grab leaves and open up fruits. Within the past few million years, your hominin ancestors had fairly human hands, which they used to fashion tools for digging up tubers, butchering carcasses, and laying the groundwork for our global dominance today. We know a fair amount about the transition from fins to hands thanks to the moderately mad obsession of paleontologists, who venture to inhospitable places around the Arctic where the best fossils from that period of our evolution are buried. A team of Spanish scientists has provided us with a glimpse of that story. Both fins and hands get their start in embryos.
SheldonShirts.com - The Big Bang Theory TV T-Shirts, Shirts Worn The Aikido FAQ: Introduction To Aikido What is Aikido? Whenever I move, that's Aikido. O Sensei, Morihei Ueshiba Aikido is a Japanese martial art developed by Morihei Ueshiba (often referred to by his title 'O Sensei' or 'Great Teacher'). On a purely physical level it is an art involving some throws and joint locks that are derived from Jujitsu and some throws and other techniques derived from Kenjutsu. Aikido focuses not on punching or kicking opponents, but rather on using their own energy to gain control of them or to throw them away from you. Upon closer examination, practitioners will find from Aikido what they are looking for, whether it is applicable self-defense technique, spiritual enlightenment, physical health or peace of mind. We could attempt to pigeonhole Aikido into a synopsis of X number of words, but that would not do it justice, so we leave the practitioner of Aikido to find out what Aikido is for themselves without any preconceived notions. What are the different styles in Aikido? The "Old" Schools Aiki-Budo
Fossils Of 500 Million Year Old Marine Predator Anomalocaris Discovered | FinestDaily ShareShare A recent discovery in the field of paleontology reveals probably the oldest predator known to man. The fossils found on Kangaroo Island are being studied by scientists from the University of Adelaide, Australia. The fossilized eyes belonged to the 500 million-year-old Anomalocaris, a marine creature believed to be at the top of the food chain in prehistoric times. Taking into consideration the studies so far, it seems that the Anomalocaris had extremely acute vision, considered better than any other insects or crustaceans, even by today’s standards. Thanks to the discovery of its eyes, meticulous analysis shows amazing details when it comes to optical design, with some similarities much alike contemporary crabs, flies and kin. These fossils make the Anomalocaris the ancestor of today’s arthropods, alongside other evolutionary implications that affect a lot of species.
Secrets of the first practical artificial leaf A detailed description of development of the first practical artificial leaf -- a milestone in the drive for sustainable energy that mimics the process, photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert water and sunlight into energy -- appears in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research. The article notes that unlike earlier devices, which used costly ingredients, the new device is made from inexpensive materials and employs low-cost engineering and manufacturing processes. Daniel G. To make these devices more widely available, Nocera replaced the platinum catalyst that produces hydrogen gas with a less-expensive nickel-molybdenum-zinc compound. The author acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation and the Chesonis Family Foundation.
Matrix mechanics Matrix mechanics is a formulation of quantum mechanics created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925. Matrix mechanics was the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. It extended the Bohr Model by describing how the quantum jumps occur. It did so by interpreting the physical properties of particles as matrices that evolve in time. Development of matrix mechanics In 1925, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. Epiphany at Helgoland In 1925 Werner Heisenberg was working in Göttingen on the problem of calculating the spectral lines of hydrogen. "It was about three o' clock at night when the final result of the calculation lay before me. The Three Papers After Heisenberg returned to Göttingen, he showed Wolfgang Pauli his calculations, commenting at one point:[2] In the paper, Heisenberg formulated quantum theory without sharp electron orbits. .
John Dies at the End » Fuck the Karate Kid Updates » February, 2010 Fuck the Karate Kid Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world. Not just that movie, but all of the movies like it (you certainly can’t let the Rocky sequels escape blame). You know what I’m talking about; the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. pics unrelated When I run out of ideas for horror novels (which will happen about, oh, two horror novels from now) I want to write this up as a self-help book, probably titled Fuck the Karate Kid: Why Life is So Much Harder Than We Think, by Dr. (NOTE: If you’re new here, hi, my name is David Wong and I wrote John Dies at the End, available everywhere in hardcover etc). It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. Accomplishing worthwhile things isn’t just a little harder than people think; it’s ten or twenty times harder. So, people bail on diets. Fucking Karate Kid.
Top 10 Unusual but Fascinating Cloud Formations What is the sky without little fluffy clouds? Boring if you ask me. A cloudless plain sky is like a garden without flowers. Clouds can generally be classified by appearance – cumulus (heap), stratus (layer), cirrus (curl), nimbus (rain) – or by height of cloud base – high level, mid level, low level clouds and clouds with vertical development. I’ve gathered in this Top 10 list some of the strangest, most beautiful cloud formations: 10. The Kelvin-Helmholtz wave cloud looks like crashing ocean waves. Billow clouds are often good indicators of atmospheric instability. 9. Cirrus clouds come in many shapes and sizes and occur in the coldest and highest region of the troposphere. The delicate and thin cirrus radiatus clouds appear to converge towards one point on the horizon. 8. The beautiful shelf clouds are low-level semicircular arcus clouds. Shelf clouds stick out like a shelf from their parent thunderstorm cloud. This type of clouds is easily mistaken with wall clouds. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2.
MIT Paper Works out Paradox; Fry may not be own Grandfather It would appear that longstanding and tricky paradox of time travel, that one who travels backward in time could conceivably influence it to the point where the time travel couldn’t have happened is dead. All hail the longstanding and tricky paradox. This, the “grandfather paradox,” is so named because of the thought experiment used to illustrate it. A time traveler could theoretically go back in the past and murder his own grandfather, which would render the time traveler non extant, and thus would lead to the paradox of the time traveler never having been able to go back in time in the first place. Pudding. The same holds true in a less dramatic fashion for subatomic particles like quarks and photons, which hold a much higher likelihood of ever traveling into the past, based on the strange, spooky behavior they’ve demonstrated for the people who’ve studied and been alarmed by them thus far. This little conundrum made time travel fundamentally dangerous, if not impossible.
Giant Tropical Lake Found on Saturn Moon Titan An oasis of liquid methane has unexpectedly been discovered amid the tropical dunes of Saturn's moon Titan, researchers say. This lake in the otherwise dry tropics of Titan hints that subterranean channels of liquid methane might feed it from below, scientists added. Titan has clouds, rain and lakes, like Earth, but these are composed of methane rather than water. However, methane lakes were seen only at Titan's poles until now — its tropics around the equator were apparently home to dune fields instead. Now near-infrared pictures of Titan from the Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn collected since 2004 suggest a vast methane lake exists on the surface in the moon's tropics, one about 925 square miles (2,400 square kilometers) large and at least three feet (1 meter) deep. A number of models of methane's behavior on Titan convincingly show that lakes are not stable at the moon's tropical latitudes. "This discovery was absolutely not expected," Griffith said.
museum of science, art and human perception Roppongi Hills Garden Pond - Tokyo, Japan When the Roppongi Hills urban development project opened in 2003, it quickly wowed Tokyoites with its office towers, art museum, deluxe hotels, and prestigious shopping. The most curious part of the development, however, is not its flashy design or luxury buildings, but the small garden that separates the office and cinema complex from a local TV studio. Here, amid sunbathing office workers and locals eating lunch, sits a quiet pond ringed by reeds and irises. The pond itself dates back to the late 18th century, but that's not all. It is filled with tiny silvery fish — fish from beyond this world. The pond's medaka — a species of small freshwater fish (Oryzias latipes ) once common in flooded Japanese rice paddies, but highly susceptible to pesticides and fertilizer run-off — are descendants of those bred aboard the 1994 Columbia space shuttle. A small sign asks people not to dump unwanted goldfish or other pets into the pond, in case they eat the precious space-fish descendants.