Pretty much, yeah.

2nd July 2012

Photo reblogged from Quantumaniac with 84 notes

quantumaniac:

Newly Discovered Mineral from Beginning of the Solar System

Hidden within a rock from space is a mineral previously unknown to science: panguite.

The new mineral was found embedded in the Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1969. Since 2007, geologist Chi Ma of Caltech has been probing the meteorite with a scanning electron microscope, discovering nine new materials, including panguite.

Ma and his team have determined that panguite was one of the first solid materials to coalesce in our solar system, roughly 4.567 billion years ago. The mineral’s name is a reference to Pan Gu, a primitive, hairy giant from Chinese mythology who separated yin and yang with a swing of his enormous axe, thereby creating the Earth and sky.

Panguite’s primordial nature means that it was actually around before the Earth and other planets formed, meaning it can help scientists learn more about the conditions in the cloud of gas and dust that gave rise to our solar system.

Geology geeks can note that the mineral’s chemical name is (Ti⁴⁺,Sc,Al,Mg,Zr,Ca)_1.8O₃, meaning that it contains some familiar elements like oxygen, magnesium, and aluminum, but also some more exotic ones like zirconium and scandium. Zirconium in particular is a key element that can help scientists decipher the environment before and during the solar system’s formation.

The International Mineralogical Association’s Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature, and Classification has approved the new mineral and its name and a paper describing its properties was published online June 26 in American Mineralogist.

Tagged: SciencePhysicsSpaceAstronomyAwesomeInterestingCoolGeekNerdMineralElementPeriodicChemistryQuantumaniac

25th June 2012

Photo reblogged from localcreature with 5 notes

scienceyoucanlove:

there exists stars that feed on their stellar counterparts (it’s probably a lot cooler than it sounds). For decades, astronomers have been puzzled by the extended life-spans of extremely hot, metal-poor, blue main sequence stars in globular clusters. These stars normally have a short life-span (in the cosmological timescale) of a few million years in comparison to their counterparts, red and yellow dwarfs, which usually last billions of years. These “blue-stragglers” (as they’ve now been called) are peculiar stars indeed. While their neighbors are showing their age and nearing the end of their life spans, these stars still appear young and still very hot. Why? Astronomers have a few ideas. First, it was widely believed that these blue-stragglers are the result of the collision of two stars. This theory was dispelled when astronomers looked at several blue-stragglers in 56 globular clusters and discovered that the total amount of the hot stars in the multiple clusters didn’t match the predicted collision rate. The second theory is that the blue-stragglers are galactic cannibals that munch on their neighbors. This was reaffirmed by a study that took place in 2006 where astronomers examined 43 blue-stragglers in the global cluster 47 Tucanae and discovered that six of them had considerably less carbon and oxygen than the rest of them. This discovery led astronomers to believe that the blue-stragglers were siphoning the materials from their stellar companion in a binary system, which assisted the star in burning hotter and brighter. Indeed, the latter theory is still holding up. In 2011 another study of 21 blue-stragglers in the NGC 188 cluster (a 7 billion year old cluster of 3,000 stars in the Cepheus constellation) observered that most of the blue-stragglers are in binary systems. Astronomers were able to see the wobble of the blue-straggler as its companion white dwarf (which isn’t actually visible) gravitationally pulls on it. At first, they thought the process was a violent, spectacular event, but instead, the study of the SS Leporis binary system shows it is in fact a relatively slow, mysterious process that’s taking place. We still don’t have all of the answers. Astronomers are quick to point out that these blue-stragglers can probably be produced in other ways, but that’s another story for a time when we know a bit more about them. Written by: Jaime Trosper Source(s)/Further Reading: http://www.space.com/13326-mysterious-vampire-stars-blue-stragglers.html http://www.space.com/6311-oddball-blue-stragglers-stellar-cannibals.html http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/vampire-binary-star-system/ The “bad astronomer” talks about globular clusters: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/09/27/a-distant-sparkling-eruption-of-diamonds/ Pictured: “This old dog is doing new tricks. On the left is ancient globular cluster 47 Tucanae which formed many billions of years ago. On the right is a closeup of its dense stellar center by the Hubble Space Telescope, released last week. Circled are mysterious stars called “blue stragglers.” Stars as bright and blue as blue stragglers live short lives, much shorter than the age of the host globular cluster itself. But this contradicts evidence that globular cluster stars formed all at once. Although this problem has been known for almost 50 years, a mass and spin rate for a blue straggler was first published last Saturday. This new information indicates that BSS 19 was rejuvenated by two orbiting stars slowly coalescing , and not by a dramatic collision.” (from APOD.NASA) http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap971104.html IMAGE CREDIT: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA-GSFC)

Tagged: starssciencespacevampire starscool

Source: facebook.com

14th May 2012

Photo reblogged from The Science of Reality with 105 notes

sci-fact:

Though thermodynamics dictates that nothing can ever reach absolute zero, laboratory scientists have achieved temperatures below 100 picokelvin - less than 100 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero. These experiments mark the coldest temperatures ever recorded, man-made or otherwise. Recently, experiments have been proposed that would achieve femto-kelvin temperatures, just quadrillionths of a degree above absolute zero.

Tagged: sciencefactsci-factcoldtemperaturecoollaboratorykelvininformativefacts

Source: sci-fact

27th April 2012

Photo reblogged from Quantumaniac with 488 notes

quantumaniac:

The Virus That Might Kill Your Computer on July 9th (And How to Stop It!)

It sounds like one of those annoying chain e-mails that show up from technically-challenged acquaintances: “The FBI Will Take Your Computer Offline July 9 If It Has A Virus! Visit This Site Immediately To Check!! Forward This To Everyone You Know!!!”

But the Federal Bureau of Investigation really has posted a warning on its site about the risk of “DNSChanger” malware, which really will result in your computer getting disconnected from the Web on July 9, if you don’t clean it up.

The story began last November when the Bureau announced it had busted a four-year-old Estonia-based conspiracy. The suspects had infected about 4 million computers — some 500,000 in the United States — with malware called DNSChanger (also referred to as Alureon) that diverted victims to scam sites.

This “rootkit” malware was usually delivered as a fake download for Windows or Mac OS X that then silently altered the Domain Name System (DNS) settings on computers and even some wireless routers. That’s about the most serious compromise an Internet-connected machine can suffer; when DNS stops correctly translating domain names like discovery.com to machine-readable Internet Protocol addresses like 63.240.215.85, you no longer know what sites you’re dealing with.

But once an infected machine had been cuffed to DNSChanger’s rogue servers, shutting it off would effectively unplug it from the Internet. To give unaware victims time to clean up their systems, the FBI secured a court order requiring the Internet Systems Consortium, a non-profit Net-architecture firm, to take over and sanitize those servers.

But all bad things must end; after one stay of execution, ISC is now set to turn off the DNSChanger servers on July 9. At that point, any infected machine will only be able to connect to numerical IP addresses, essentially, a rotary-dial version of the Internet.

Early advice on checking for a DNSChanger infection required a fair degree of technical skill, but now you just need to be able to read one line of text or know the difference between green and red. Visit www.dns-ok.us; if you see a green background to the image on that page and the words “DNS Resolution = GREEN,” you’re safe. (Your Internet provider may also offer a similar service; Comcast subscribers, for example, can check their computers at amibotted.comcast.net.)

If you see otherwise, you have a month and change to fix the problem. Since DNSChanger can disable security programs, you may not be able to do this the easy way, by clicking a “scan” button in your anti-virus app. You can try specialized DNSChanger-removal tools from such firms as SecureMac or run general-purpose anti-rootkit software like MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware or Kaspersky Labs’ TDSSKiller.

The DNS Changer Working Group, created by Internet-security experts to help clean up the problem, has also set up a page with links to manual malware-cleanup instructions from Microsoft and others. In a worst-case scenario, you may need to reinstall your computer’s operating system and software from scratch, using either the discs that came with the computer or the recovery partition on its hard drive. 

But that still beats having a computer that can only navigate the Internet by numbers. So if you have friends or family members online who might not know to check for this problem, please forward this post to them. But hold the exclamation points.

Tagged: TechnologyComputerScienceVirusPCMacInternetInterwebAwesomeInterestingCoolNewsAnonymousGeekNerdQuantumaniac

22nd April 2012

Photo reblogged from Quantumaniac with 2,449 notes

quantumaniac:

Earth Will One Day See a Second Sun

Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star located in the Orion constellation, about 640 light-years away from Earth - is preparing to explode via a supernova. When it does, the Earth will have a front-row seat; in fact, the explosion will be so bright that Earth will seem to briefly have two suns in the sky. 

Betelgeuse is one of the brightest and largest stars in our immediate galactic neighborhood - if you dropped it in our Solar System, it would extend all the way out to Jupiter, leaving Earth completely engulfed. In stellar terms, it’s predicted to explode in the very near future. Of course, the conversion from stellar to human terms is pretty extreme, as Betelgeuse is predicted to explode anytime in the next million years.

But still, whether the explosion occurs in 2011 or 1002011 (give or take 640 years for the light to reach Earth), it’s going to make for one of the most unforgettable light shows in our planet’s history. For a few weeks, the supernova will be so bright that there will appear to be two stars in the sky, and night will be indistinguishable from day for much of that time. So don’t count on getting a lot of sleep when Betelgeuse explodes, because the only sensible thing for the world to do will be to throw a weeks-long global supernova party.

Physicist Brad Carter explains what Earth (and hopefully humanity) can look forward to:

“This is the final hurrah for the star. It goes bang, it explodes, it lights up - we’ll have incredible brightness for a brief period of time for a couple of weeks and then over the coming months it begins to fade and then eventually it will be very hard to see at all.”

Although there’ll be no missing the explosion, Carter points out that the vast majority of material shot out from the supernova will pass by Earth completely unnoticed:

“When a star goes bang, the first we will observe of it is a rain of tiny particles called neutrinos. They will flood through the Earth and bizarrely enough, even though the supernova we see visually will light up the night sky, 99 per cent of the energy in the supernova is released in these particles that will come through our bodies and through the Earth with absolutely no harm whatsoever.”

In any event, the Betelgeuse explosion will likely be the most dramatic supernova Earth ever witnesses - well, unless our Sun eventually explodes and destroys our planet, which would probably leave Betelgeuse the runner-up.

Tagged: SciencePhysicsAstronomyPlanetSolarSystemUniverseGalaxyAwesomeInterestingCoolSunEarthBetegeuseQuantumaniacParticleSupernovaNovaNebula

21st April 2012

Photo reblogged from Scinerds with 777 notes

quantumaniac:

The Candle Problem

Given a book of matches, a box of thumbtacks, and a candle, how can you fix the candle to the wall so that its wax won’t drip onto the table below?

See Answer Below

Pin the box to the wall, put the candle in the box, and light it.

In experiments, Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker found that most subjects instead tried to pin the candle directly to the wall or to use melted wax to affix it there (neither worked). Duncker called this “functional fixedness” — a “mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.” In this case, subjects had “fixated” on the box’s function as a container, which prevented them from considering it as a platform. If the box was empty at the start of the experiment, they were more likely to find the correct solution.

In a 2000 study, psychologists Tim German and Margaret Defeyter found the 6- and 7-year-olds show signs of functional fixedness, but 5-year-olds appear immune to it: “Rather than taking into account only the properfunction of an object, they adopt and agents-goals view of function in which any intentional use of an object can be its function.”

Read more

Tagged: everythingRiddleMathematicsEducationAwesomeInterestingCoolPuzzleGeekNerdCandleBrainThinkProblemQuantumaniac

Source: quantumaniac