Science is Cool....

[Fish]

This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.

Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.

Why should I care?:

[TimeForWasp]

I wish our galaxy was named Andromeda. Milky Way sounds like the Pioli family named it.

[Mojo Jojo]

[Dave Lane]

Originally Posted by Discuss Thrower

Wonder if they went extinct solely because of food scarcity, brought on by their own size and by environmental changes

I've read all his stuff, it's interesting really he's relying on massive eruptions in the Siberian area and possibly India caused a massive reduction in the dinosaur population and possibly they were already dead. I doubt this is the case but reduction is likely.

And as for not finding bones at the KT boundary it's pretty apparent to anyone that studied the impact that the entire surface of the earth was incinerated in ways you have to study to understand. Surface of the earth was probably around 25000 degrees for a period of time. Only underground and deep ocean animals survived.

[Dave Lane]

Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins

Here is stevie's source:

http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/...f-of-Bible.php

Here is the passage that he, and said website, claims about light's properties:

Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof,



Sounds ironclad to me...

This new learning amazes me Sir Bedivere, explain to me again how it is we know the world to be banana shaped?

[Dave Lane]

Originally Posted by jiveturkey

Andromeda Galaxy's Actual Size If It Were Brighter

Love it, have a new Andromeda shot coming up.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Fish

Supposedly the most popular place in the ISS.. especially considering they see 15 sunrises and 15 sunsets every single day. How weird would that feel?

Of course it's popular. It's where the chicks do their earthbathing.

[Fish]

[Fish]

I guess you really can feel happiness all over...

These heat maps reveal where we feel love, anger, shame & sadness on our bodies



Scientists have conclusively proven that love gives you the warm fuzzies and sadness makes you feel blue.

A team of Finnish researchers have created heat maps of where and how emotions are experienced on the human body. The goal of the study was to find out if there is a consistent connection, across various demographic groups and geographical regions, between what we feel and the physical sensation of that feeling.

“Even though we are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving rise to these subjective sensations have remained unresolved. Here we used a topographical self-report tool to reveal that different emotional states are associated with topographically distinct and culturally universal bodily sensations; these sensations could underlie our conscious emotional experiences,” the findings said.

The study asked 773 participants to color bodily regions where they felt activity increasing or decreasing while viewing stimulus, such as emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expression. They were prompted with six “basic” emotions and seven “complex” emotions, as well as a neutral state.

Yellow indicates the strongest amount of activity, followed by red, black, dark blue and light blue at the bottom, for a deadening of emotion.

Happiness shows yellow and red coloring all over, with the strongest feelings in the head and chest. Love is strongest of all the emotions, with yellow filling in the head, chest, and groin region. Unlike happiness, we apparently don’t feel love in our legs.

Depression is also experienced across the body, with the head and limbs showing up as various shades of blue. Interestingly the depressed stomach feels neutral. Sadness, in contrast, is dark blue on the arms and legs, but the head and chest show red.

Shame and anxiety are experienced all over the body as well, with warm colors in the head and chest, and blue colors in the legs. Surprise doesn’t look that different from shame, and envy — like surprise — shows up as red in the head and chest, and dark blue in the legs. Contempt and envy resemble each other, although contempt is strong in the head and only felt in the groin area on the bottom half.

Fear and disgust manifest as warm and hot colors in the head through the stomach. Fear is felt more in the chest, while disgust is stronger in our mouth and stomach. Interestingly, the pride body map resembles happiness, love, and anger in its yellow across the head and chest.

The study says that numerous studies before it established that emotions prepare us for external challenges by adjusting our bodies to respond. These assume that our bodies react, thus triggering emotional feelings that will affect our behavior. However, it is still uncertain whether “the bodily changes associated with different emotions are specific enough to serve as the basis for discrete emotional feelings.”

“We propose that consciously felt emotions are associated with culturally universal, topographically distinct bodily sensations that may support the categorical experience of different emotions,” the report said.

Beyond being interesting, this research could have significant implications for the psychology, serving as a “biomarker for emotional disorders.”

[Fish]

The Large Hadron Collider hasn't killed us all yet. So we gonna pimp this bitch and try again....

CERN begins LHC upgrade, to hopefully ‘change our understanding of the universe’



Following the discovery of what appears to be the Higgs boson, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has been shut down so that it can be upgraded. If all goes the plan, the upgrades will almost double the power of the LHC, enabling the particle accelerator to carry out the second part of its primary mission: proving or disproving the existence of supersymmetry.

The LHC consists of a ring tunnel that is 17 miles (27km) in circumference, up to a depth of 175 meters (574ft) below the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. Inside the tunnel are two beamlines, each carrying a proton beam that travel in opposite directions around the ring. The beams intersect at four points, where the proton beams are smashed together, producing oodles of data that is then analyzed by the ATLAS and CMS particle detectors. Depending on the strength of the beams, different kinds of collisions occur, and different subatomic particles are produced. The proton beams are kept on their circular path with the help of 1,624 superconducting electromagnets, most of which weigh more than 27 tonnes. The magnets, which are made of niobium-titanium, are kept at -271.25 Celcius (1.9 Kelvin) with the help of 96 tonnes of liquid helium; the LHC is the largest cryogenic facility in the world, by some margin.

Up until its planned shutdown, each of the LHC’s proton beams had an energy of 4 TeV (teraelectronvolts), resulting in a total collision energy of 8 TeV. After the upgrade, each beam will operate at 6.5 TeV, for a combined collision energy of 13 TeV — more than six times the power of any previous particle accelerator. To achieve this upgrade, according to the BBC, CERN is replacing 10,000 connections, installing 5,000 insulation systems, and performing 10,170 leak tests and 18,000 electrical tests. Some of the magnets will also be tested or replaced. In total, the upgrade will cost ~$105 million, and should be completed by early 2015.

Some critics claim that CERN is throwing good money after bad, as this upgrade is actually more of a repair. The original LHC design spec, as it was completed in 2008, should’ve been capable of 7 TeV proton beams (14 TeV collisions). Due to an accident just after it was turned on, though, an electrical fault led to six tonnes of liquid helium exploding into the tunnels, causing significant damage and an extensive repair period. In the four years since, the physicists haven’t taken the beams past 4 TeV, for fear of blowing another gasket.

Having found a Higgs boson (not necessarily the Higgs boson), though — one of the LHC’s primary goals — it is now a lot easier for CERN to justify the long shutdown. In essence, when the LHC switches back on in 2015, it will finally be performing at a level that should’ve been possible back in 2008.

With the LHC at full power, the scientific community will try to confirm that they have actually found the Higgs boson, and after that they will continue the search for proof of supersymmetry — the particle accelerator’s other primary goal. ”The LHC is more than just a one trick pony,” ATLAS project leader Pippa Wells tells the BBC. “It wasn’t designed to find just the Higgs. We hope to find something completely new that will change our understanding of the Universe. We are on the threshold of finding many more new particles.” In essence, supersymmetry is a theory that postulates that there are a lot more particles out there, in the TeV energy range, that would fill in some of the gaps left by the Standard Model. In the supersymmetrical version of the Standard Model we would need to double the number of elementary particles, as none of the existing particles (gluons, photons, electrons, etc.) could be superpartners of each other.

So far, going by observations made in late 2012, it doesn’t look very good for supersymmetry — but really, that’s what makes the LHC so darn exciting: Not even the world’s most eminent particle physicists have any idea what the Large Hadron Collider will find at higher energy levels.

[Fish]

****ing dolphins. First the rape revelation, and now we find that they're doing drugs too?

Dolphins get high on pufferfish toxin



Dolphins have a reputation for being happy friendly animals, partly due to their incredible intelligence and Flipper-like portrayal in the media. We’ve already exposed that dolphins are capable of being gigantic jerks and have even been witnessed using a dead fish as a masturbatory tool (highly NSFW video), but now it appears that these underwater deviants also get high recreationally from a potentially lethal source.

Emmy award-winning filmmaker John Downer was filming the upcoming two-part miniseries Dolphins: Spy in the Pod when he noticed that bottlenose dolphins would gently chew on a pufferfish and then pass it to another dolphin in the pod. He noticed that after chewing on the pufferfish, the dolphins would look very tranquil and dazed. Then it hit him: these dolphins were getting high on the nerve toxin released by the pufferfish.

If his prior knowledge of pufferfish toxin wasn’t an indication of what these dolphins were doing, their subsequent behavior was a dead giveaway. They spent a great deal of time observing their own reflection on the water’s surface and acting very strange in general.

Downer’s crew was able to get this inside look through creative spy cameras, similar to what has been used for many of his other documentary miniseries. Underwater shots were taken with fish-shaped cameras while above water shots were taken with a camera that looks like a inconspicuous sea turtle. With the dolphins surrounded by cameras that looked like normal, everyday sea creatures, they were more relaxed and exhibited behavior that may not have been captured with traditional filming techniques.

- See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and....4ESPyqdb.dpuf

[BigRedChief]

Originally Posted by Fish

The Large Hadron Collider hasn't killed us all yet. So we gonna pimp this bitch and try again....

yeah it was going to destroy the earth. Where are those "scientists" now? Chairman of the science committe of the Mississippi Republican party?

[Fish]

New magnetic cycle of the Sun has begun as its magnetic field “flips upside down”

The sun’s magnetic cycles last 22 years. For the first half, the magnetic north end is located in the sun’s northern hemisphere with the magnetic south in the southern hemisphere, as would seem to make sense. At the 11 year mark, however, the sun’s magnetic orientation flips, leaving the magnetic north in the southern hemisphere and vice versa; this is known as a Solar Cycle. At the end of that 11 years, the sun “flips” back and marks the beginning of the next magnetic cycle. NASA has released a video giving a visual representation of this phenomenon.

Recently, the sun reached the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24 and the magnetic north pole shifted into the southern hemisphere. Aside from the predictable time scale of the event, astronomers knew the flip was about to happen due to an increase in solar activity in the form of sunspots, coronal mass ejections, and flares. Magnetic fields in the sun’s atmosphere trap hot gas, and leading up to a magnetic flip, these pockets are released and result in huge bursts, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). When this solar activity peaks, known as the solar maximum, the magnetic orientation flips. Once the magnetic north returns to the northern hemisphere, the former solar cycle ends and the next one begins.

Though sunspots had been observed since prehistoric time, they had not been investigated with a telescope until 1610 by Thomas Harriot. Regular investigation of the sunspots began in the 18th century, with the first recorded solar cycle beginning in March of 1755. Though the cycles are roughly 11 years, the shortest cycle lasted only 9 years and the longest lasted 14 years.

This video shows the magnetic orientation of the sun, with the green denoting the magnetic north and purple representing the magnetic south. The video begins in the spring of 1997, and shows the beginning of Solar Cycle 24 in 2002. The video ends in October of 2013, just before the orientation flipped.

[ThaVirus]

Originally Posted by Fish

****ing dolphins. First the rape revelation, and now we find that they're doing drugs too?

Dolphins get high on pufferfish toxin



Dolphins have a reputation for being happy friendly animals, partly due to their incredible intelligence and Flipper-like portrayal in the media. We’ve already exposed that dolphins are capable of being gigantic jerks and have even been witnessed using a dead fish as a masturbatory tool (highly NSFW video), but now it appears that these underwater deviants also get high recreationally from a potentially lethal source.

Emmy award-winning filmmaker John Downer was filming the upcoming two-part miniseries Dolphins: Spy in the Pod when he noticed that bottlenose dolphins would gently chew on a pufferfish and then pass it to another dolphin in the pod. He noticed that after chewing on the pufferfish, the dolphins would look very tranquil and dazed. Then it hit him: these dolphins were getting high on the nerve toxin released by the pufferfish.

If his prior knowledge of pufferfish toxin wasn’t an indication of what these dolphins were doing, their subsequent behavior was a dead giveaway. They spent a great deal of time observing their own reflection on the water’s surface and acting very strange in general.

Downer’s crew was able to get this inside look through creative spy cameras, similar to what has been used for many of his other documentary miniseries. Underwater shots were taken with fish-shaped cameras while above water shots were taken with a camera that looks like a inconspicuous sea turtle. With the dolphins surrounded by cameras that looked like normal, everyday sea creatures, they were more relaxed and exhibited behavior that may not have been captured with traditional filming techniques.

- See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and....4ESPyqdb.dpuf

That is hilarious, especially the bolded part.

[Fish]

NASA is pretty sure it's now seen evidence of an entire star being consumed by a black hole.

Death By Black Hole In Small Galaxy?



A bright, long duration flare may be the first recorded event of a black hole destroying a star in a dwarf galaxy. The evidence comes from two independent studies using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes.

As part of an ongoing search of Chandra's archival data for events signaling the disruption of stars by massive black holes, astronomers found a prime candidate. Beginning in 1999, an unusually bright X-ray source had appeared in a dwarf galaxy and then faded until it was no longer detected after 2005.

"We can't see the star being torn apart by the black hole," Peter Maksym of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, AL, who led one of the studies, “but we can track what happens to the star's remains, and compare it with other, similar events. This one fits the profile of 'death by a black hole.'"

Scientists predict that a star that wanders too close to a giant, or supermassive, black hole could be ripped apart by extreme tidal forces. As the stellar debris falls toward the black hole, it would produce intense X-radiation as it is heated to millions of degrees. The X-rays would diminish in a characteristic manner as the hot gas spiraled inward.

In the past few years, Chandra and other astronomical satellites have identified several suspected cases of a supermassive black hole ripping apart a nearby star. This newly discovered episode of cosmic, black-hole-induced violence is different because it has been associated with a much smaller galaxy than these other cases.

The so-called dwarf galaxy is located in the galaxy cluster Abell 1795, about 800 million light years from Earth. It contains about 700 million stars, far less than a typical galaxy like the Milky Way, which has between 200 and 400 billion stars.

Moreover, the black hole in this dwarf galaxy may be only be a few hundred thousand times as massive as the Sun, making it ten times less massive than the Galaxy's supermassive black hole, and placing it in what astronomers call an "intermediate mass black hole" category.

"Scientists have been searching for these intermediate mass black holes for decades," said Davide Donato of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md., who led a separate team of researchers. "We have lots of evidence for small black holes and very big ones, but these medium-sized ones have been tough to pin down."

The evidence for a star being ripped apart by the dwarf galaxy's black hole came from combing through Chandra data that had been taken over several years. Because Abell 1795 is a target that Chandra observes regularly to help calibrate its instruments, the researchers had access to an unusually large reservoir of data on this object.

"We are very lucky that we had so much data on Abell 1795 over such a long period of time," said Donato's co-author Brad Cenko, also of GSFC. "Without that, we could never have uncovered this special event."

The dwarf galaxy's location in a galaxy cluster also makes it a potential victim of another type of cosmic violence. Because galaxy clusters are crowded with galaxies, it's possible that a large number of stars have been pulled away from the dwarf galaxy by gravitational interactions with another galaxy in the past, a process called tidal stripping.

"It looks like the stars in this galaxy not only need to worry about the black hole in the center," said Makysm's co-author Melville Ulmer of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "They might also be stolen away on the outside by gravity from a passing galaxy."

Astronomers believe that intermediate mass black holes may be the "seeds" that ultimately formed the supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way. Finding additional nearby examples should teach us about how these primordial galaxies from the early universe grew and evolved over cosmic time.

Some of the additional clues to this star attack came from NASA's Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer that picked up a very bright ultraviolet source in 1998, which could have marked a time just after the star was initially torn apart. A flare in X-rays may have also been detected with ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite in 2000.

Peter Maksym presented these results today at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC on behalf of his team. A paper describing their work is available online and was published in the November 1st, 2013 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper by Davide Donato and his colleagues on this same event is available online and was accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., controls Chandra's science and flight operations.

[ToxSocks]

Originally Posted by Fish

I guess you really can feel happiness all over...

These heat maps reveal where we feel love, anger, shame & sadness on our bodies



Scientists have conclusively proven that love gives you the warm fuzzies and sadness makes you feel blue.

A team of Finnish researchers have created heat maps of where and how emotions are experienced on the human body. The goal of the study was to find out if there is a consistent connection, across various demographic groups and geographical regions, between what we feel and the physical sensation of that feeling.

“Even though we are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving rise to these subjective sensations have remained unresolved. Here we used a topographical self-report tool to reveal that different emotional states are associated with topographically distinct and culturally universal bodily sensations; these sensations could underlie our conscious emotional experiences,” the findings said.

The study asked 773 participants to color bodily regions where they felt activity increasing or decreasing while viewing stimulus, such as emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expression. They were prompted with six “basic” emotions and seven “complex” emotions, as well as a neutral state.

Yellow indicates the strongest amount of activity, followed by red, black, dark blue and light blue at the bottom, for a deadening of emotion.

Happiness shows yellow and red coloring all over, with the strongest feelings in the head and chest. Love is strongest of all the emotions, with yellow filling in the head, chest, and groin region. Unlike happiness, we apparently don’t feel love in our legs.

Depression is also experienced across the body, with the head and limbs showing up as various shades of blue. Interestingly the depressed stomach feels neutral. Sadness, in contrast, is dark blue on the arms and legs, but the head and chest show red.

Shame and anxiety are experienced all over the body as well, with warm colors in the head and chest, and blue colors in the legs. Surprise doesn’t look that different from shame, and envy — like surprise — shows up as red in the head and chest, and dark blue in the legs. Contempt and envy resemble each other, although contempt is strong in the head and only felt in the groin area on the bottom half.

Fear and disgust manifest as warm and hot colors in the head through the stomach. Fear is felt more in the chest, while disgust is stronger in our mouth and stomach. Interestingly, the pride body map resembles happiness, love, and anger in its yellow across the head and chest.

The study says that numerous studies before it established that emotions prepare us for external challenges by adjusting our bodies to respond. These assume that our bodies react, thus triggering emotional feelings that will affect our behavior. However, it is still uncertain whether “the bodily changes associated with different emotions are specific enough to serve as the basis for discrete emotional feelings.”

“We propose that consciously felt emotions are associated with culturally universal, topographically distinct bodily sensations that may support the categorical experience of different emotions,” the report said.

Beyond being interesting, this research could have significant implications for the psychology, serving as a “biomarker for emotional disorders.”

Maybe i missed it, but i don't see "Orgasm" on here anywhere.