The other papers in the Science package reveal other intriguing details about Mercury: it has a magnetic field like Earth, but it's a weak one, and the magnetic pole is tilted about three degrees from the actual, geographical pole; it has a population of charged particles swirling about it like Earth does, but the magnetic field is not powerful enough to organize them into anything like Earth's Van Allen belts; plains in the planet's northern hemisphere have now been confirmed to have been formed by volcanism, meaning Mercury was geologically more active than once believed.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Mysterious Mercury
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Looking Down on a Shooting Star
Astronauts captured this unusual view of a Perseid meteor descending into Earth's atmosphere in August 2011.
Source: Looking Down on a Shooting Star
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Leave it to the French to drive Citroën 2CV-based jeeps across the Sahara [Road Trips]
A 600 cc, two-cylinder 2CV kitted out with sheet steel panels bolted together and called the Baby-Brousse is less ridiculous than it sounds. Leaving behind their humble origins as French peasant cars, these little Citroëns rode in 1973 from Paris to Abidjan, on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, to shame all future Paris–Dakar wannabes. More »
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
The True Marvels of Engineering (and Techno-Gibberish) [Video]
If you think you are up to date on your techno-gibberish, then get ready for a whole new level with this video. The narrator did this warm-up presentation on the first take and kept a straight face while doing it. Even better, play this for your friends and watch their eyes quickly glaze over…
From YouTube: Several years ago, Rockwell International decided to get into the heavy duty transmission business. We were getting ready to tape our first introduction video, as a warm up, the professional narrator began what has become a legend within the trucking industry. This man should have won an academy for his stellar performance. Now remember this is strictly off the cuff, nothing is written down, this became the biggest talk in the industry, vs our new product which we were introducing. I think you will enjoy this once in a lifetime performance from this gentleman.
Source: The True Marvels of Engineering (and Techno-Gibberish) [Video]
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Earth’s two moons
There's a big difference between the side of the Moon we can see, and the side we can't. Although it seems pretty pockmarked to the layperson, 'our' side of the Moon is actually the smooth half. On the dark side, there's huge mountain ranges and much bigger craters.
There are lots of theories that seek to explain this disparity. The newest: Earth once had two moons. And the smaller of the pair eventually crashed into it's larger sibling on the side that faces away from Earth. From the BBC:
Dr Martin Jutzi from the University of Bern, Switzerland, is one of the authors of the paper. He explained: 'When we look at the current theory there is no real reason why there was only one moon.
After spending millions of years 'stuck', the smaller moon embarked on a collision course with its big sister, slowly crashing into it at a velocity of less than three kilometres per second - slower than the speed of sound in rocks.
... In a commentary, Dr Maria Zuber from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, suggests that while the new study 'demonstrates plausibility rather than proof', the authors 'raise the legitimate possibility that after the giant impact our Earth perhaps fleetingly possessed more than one moon'.
In other words, this isn't so much a proven thing, as the scientific equivalent of a plot bunny. The researchers hope to inspire studies that would either prove them wrong, or lend credence to their ideas. This could end up being the start of something big. Or it could eventually be regarded with about as much respect as the suggestion, 'What if Moon were cookie?' We'll have to wait to find out.
Source: Earth’s two moons
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
End of the World as We Know it
Good information from probably the best source regarding all this woowoo shit. Hopefully this will be Rayray approved since this info is backed up with some worthy testimony. I know, it's not on Wikipedia so it can't be true... Just fucking with ya ;)
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Severed Penis Was Put In Garbage Disposal
According to investigators, Catherine Kieu Becker, 48, “used an unknown type poison and/or drug in the male’s food to make him sleepy. She tied him to the bed and as he woke the female cut off his penis" with a 10-inch kitchen knife. Becker, pictured in the mug shot at right, then allegedly “tossed the penis…in the garbage disposal and turned the disposal to the ‘on’ position.”
The 51-year-old victim, who is in the midst of a divorce from Becker, told detectives that he “believed something was wrong with his food.” After lying down and falling asleep, cops reported that the man awoke to his wife “tugging his clothes off. The suspect grabbed the victim’s penis and cut it off.”
Becker, who called 911, reportedly told officers that her husband “deserved it.” The man was transported to a local hospital where he underwent emergency surgery and is in serious condition.
In mid-May, citing “irreconcilable differences,” Becker’s husband filed a petition seeking to end the childless couple’s 16-month marriage, according to Orange County Superior Court records. The man, who reported separating from his wife on April 1, filed for divorce without the aid of an attorney. His only listed assets were a Garden Grove condominium that is underwater by $34,000, and a Toyota Prius whose debt outstrips its market value by $3000.
Arrested for aggravated mayhem, false imprisonment, assault with a deadly weapon, and other counts, Becker was booked into the Orange County jail, where she is being held in lieu of $1 million bail.
Severed Penis Was Put In Garbage Disposal | The Smoking Gun
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Neptune Completes Its First Circuit Around The Sun Since Its Discovery
Get larger image formats
These four images of Neptune were taken by NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope during the planet's 16-hour rotation. The
snapshots were taken at roughly four-hour intervals,
offering a full view of the blue-green planet. Today marks
Neptune's first orbit around the Sun since it was
discovered nearly 165 years ago. These images were taken to
commemorate the event.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
New Foe for U.S. Solar Energy: The Railroads: Scientific American
New Foe for U.S. Solar Energy: The Railroads: Scientific American
BNSF is owned by Warren Buffet now FYI.
BNSF is owned by Warren Buffet now FYI.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
This up to 1000 years old snow has metamorphosed into highly...
This up to 1000 years old snow has metamorphosed into highly pressurized glacier ice that contains almost no air bubbles. Thus it absorbs the visible light despite the scattered shortest blue fraction, giving it its distinct deep blue waved appearance. This cavity in the glacier ice formed as a result of a glacial mill, or moulin.
Rain and meltwater on the glacier surface is channelled into streams that enter the glacier at crevices. The waterfall melts a hole into the glacier while the ponded water drains towards lower elevations by forming long ice caves with an outlet at the terminus of the glacier. The fine grained sediments in the water along with wind blown sediments cause the frozen meltwater stream to appear in a muddy colour while the top of the cave exhibits the deep blue colour.
Due to the fast movement of the glacier of about 1 m per day over uneven terrain this ice cave cracked up at its end into a deep vertical crevice, called cerrac. This causes the indirect daylight to enter the ice cave from both ends resulting in homogeneous lighting of the ice tunnel.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Monday, June 13, 2011
ATTENTION EVERY OTHER DAY RAY
Widen the shit out of your blog, so Steve's pictures aren't all hanging off the edge of yo' shit.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Gas From Uranus Makes For Great Starship Fuel
Actually the title should’ve been “gas from your anus” but that would be too inappropriate. (Though funny, real funny.) Long story abbreviated: enormous planet-wide helium-3 deposits in Uranus can be harvested for interstellar travel. Helium-3 is an ideal fuel because it’s abundant and reacts well with deuterium. Deuterium is also known as ‘heavy hydrogen’ and isn’t abundant, even if it did figure in the first hydrogen bomb some time ago.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
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.
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)
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
No waiting at libraries in Detroit
Report: Nearly Half Of Detroiters Can’t Read « CBS DetroitThe 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.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Enhance your key fob via CAN bus hacking
[Igor] drives a 4th generation Volkswagen Golf, and decided he wanted to play around with the CAN bus for a bit. Knowing that the comfort bus is the most accessible and the safest to toy with, he started poking around to see what he could see (Google translation).
He pulled the trim off one of the rear doors and hooked into the comfort bus with an Arudino and a CAN interface module. He sniffed the bus’ traffic for a bit, then decided he would add some functionality to the car that it was sorely lacking. The car’s windows can all be rolled down by turning the key in any lock for more than a few seconds, however this cannot be done remotely. The functionality can be added via 3rd party modules or through manipulating the car’s programming with some prepackaged software, but [Igor] wanted to give it a go himself.
He programmed the Arduino to listen for longer than normal button presses coming from the remote. Once it detects that he is trying to roll the windows up or down, the Arduino issues the proper window control commands to the bus, and his wish is the car’s command.
It’s a pretty simple process, but then again he has just gotten started. We look forward to seeing what else [Igor] is able to pull off in the future. In the meantime, continue reading to see a quick video of his handiwork.
If you are interested in seeing what you might be able to do with your own car, check out this CAN bus sniffer we featured a while back.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Universe expansion: dark matter's out, anti-gravity's in, matter and antimatter still can't get along
Dark matter, we barely knew you, but before we ever found out if you were, in fact, the invisible hand pushing the cosmos apart, an Italian scientist ginned up a new theory that has anti-gravity doing the Yoko Ono to the universe's merry band of galaxies. Massimo Villata's theory assumes that both matter and antimatter have positive mass and energy density, which gets particles attracting particles and antiparticles attracting antiparticles through the force of gravity. To give dark matter the heave-ho from the galactic expansion equation, Villata supposes that the theory of general relativity applies in reverse to antimatter particles to create anti-gravity. And just as gravity pulls particles together, anti-gravity shoves them apart -- giving the universe its burgeoning waistline, no clown, king, or colonel required.
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