Tuesday, May 31, 2011

New 3D Map Of Our Local Universe Took 10 Years To Build

Astronomers have created the most complete 3D map of our local universe to date, which took 10 years to create, by scanning the complete night sky in near-infrared light and using data from the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) Redshift Survey (2MRS).

The detailed map of our Universe map shows all the visible structures out to about 380 million light-years, which includes about 45,000 of our neighboring galaxies, as the diameter of the Milky Way is around 100,000 light-years across.

3D map of our local universe



Saturday, May 21, 2011

Magnet Boy of Croatia: gadgets stick to his chest (big photo gallery)


Young Ivan Stoiljkovic poses for pictures with a Samsung Galaxy Tab stuck to his chest in front of his home near Koprivnica, about 62 miles (100km) north of Croatia's capital city, Zagreb, on May 12, 2011. Ivan, 6, is purported to posess an extraordinary and seemingly magical talent: the ability to attract metallic objects -- from spoons to heavy frying pans -- to his body. He is said to be able to carry up to 25 kg of metal stuck to his torso. Ivan's family also claims that his hands can emit heat and his mysterious ability has also given him healing powers. 'Medical checkups so far have reaped inconclusive results,' reports Reuters. More images follow, in which Ivan 'attracts' cutlery, cookware, an iron, and other metallic objects. In the image below, his grandfather tosses coins at his chest. Surely this isn't a hoax! (all photos: Reuters)

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Thursday, May 5, 2011

Floating Gyroscopes Vindicate Einstein | Wired Science



Four superconducting pingpong balls floating in space have just confirmed two key predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, physicists announced in a press conference Wednesday.
“We have completed this landmark experiment testing Einstein’s universe, and Einstein survives,” said physicist Francis Everitt of Stanford University, the principal investigator on NASA’s Gravity Probe Bmission.
The probe, which launched in 2004, was designed to test the effect Earth’s gravity has on the space-time around it. According to Einstein, the Earth warps its local space-time like a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline, a phenomenon called the geodetic effect. This effect means that a circle of fabric with the Earth’s circumference, about 24,900 miles, would be pulled into a shallow cone with a circumference 1.1 inches shorter.
The Earth also swirls the nearby space-time around with it as it rotates, like water spiraling around a drain, in an effect called frame-dragging.
“Picture the Earth immersed in honey, and you can imagine the honey would be dragged around with it,” Everitt said. “That’s what happens to space-time. Earth actually drags space and time around with it.”
Both effects are minuscule — Einstein himself wrote that “their magnitude is so small that confirmation of them by lab experiments is not to be thought of.” But Gravity Probe B measured them both. The results will be published in Physical Review Letters.
The spacecraft orbited Earth for 17 months carrying four pingpong-ball–sized gyroscopes. The gyroscopes were made of fused quartz spheres, which hold the Guinness Book record for “most spherical man-made object.” The spheres were covered in a soft metal called niobium and cooled to the temperature of liquid helium.
At that temperature, niobium becomes superconducting, which means that electrons can flow forever without losing energy. When the spheres are set spinning, the circling electrons give rise to a little magnetic pointer.
In Newton’s model of the universe, that pointer would point in the same direction forever as the spacecraft circled the Earth. But in Einstein’s model, where Earth twists and tugs the space-time around it, the gyroscopes’ pointer was sent atilt at a sliver-thin angle. The north-south tilt measured the geodetic effect, and the east-west tilt measured frame-dragging.
The pointer shifted by just 6,000 milliarcseconds — the width of a human hair as seen from 10 miles away — over the course of a year, Everitt said. Despite the difficulty in detecting such a small tilt, the physicists were able to confirm the geodetic effect to an accuracy of 0.28 percent, and frame-dragging to within 20 percent.
Because general relativity describes the large-scale structure of the universe, the Gravity Probe B results could help improve physicists’ understanding of cosmic phenomena from black holes to gamma-ray bursts, Everitt says.
Gravity Probe B is one of the longest-running NASA projects ever. It started in 1963, before men walked on the moon. It took five decades to develop the technologies to build gyroscopes sensitive enough to see gravitational effects.
In the meantime, those technologies found homes in a host of other NASA Earth-observing satellites, plus the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, which measured the cosmic microwave background and provided Nobel Prize–winning evidence for the big bang.
Physicist Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis, head of the external review board for Gravity Probe B, called the research team’s efforts “heroic” and stressed the importance of testing fundamental theories of nature, not just taking them for granted.
“It is popular lore that Einstein was right, but no such book is ever completely closed in science,” he said. “While the result in this case does support Einstein, it didn’t have to.”
Image: Artist’s rendition of the way the Earth warps space-time, called the geodetic effect. (NASA/Gravity Probe B)
Source: wired.com

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...and as always Comrade, have nice day


No waiting at libraries in Detroit

Report: Nearly Half Of Detroiters Can’t Read « CBS Detroit

The population of Detroit has been declining since 1950.
1.8 million to just over 700,000 in 2010.

More than a million of the smart motherfuckers got out.