Interesting Science Stuff Thread

[Bdub01 201]

Ha!!! That DOES look more like a colonoscopy than Venus

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Venus is pretty warm for any kind of presence in your colon.

 

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Linguistics gets a boost from computers.

 

Klingon is all very well, but how about ancient Akkadian?

[astronelson 339]

Ok thx for the explanation. Cause I was wondering bout it since the Shoemaker-Levy comet was pulled apart by Jupiter's gravitational pull before its pieces slammed into the planet.

 

Shoemaker-Levy 9 was very interesting.

 

For starters, Jupiter's a lot bigger than the Earth, so there's more of it to hit to begin with. As for why the comet was pulled apart, that was because of tidal forces. The part of the comet closer to Jupiter was pulled harder than the part of the comet further away. Comets aren't that structurally sound to begin with, being held together pretty much entirely by its own microscopic gravity, so when it passes very close to something like Jupiter it's liable to break up.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Jupiter's gravity well isn't much compared to a black hole, and look what happens to other weakly cohesive structures. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Here are a couple of items from the BBCs Health section.

 

Under the sea, let's go men!

 

Into the final frontier looking for new antibiotics.  Shows the level of desperation, because this is going to be very expensive.

 

Overspecialization can lead to errors.

 

When looking for snarks, they often miss the boojums.

[Zukunftstraume 220]

Here's a cute image meant to encourage science:

 

http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/8725/sciencef.jpg

 

 

Anyways, I'm sure you're all aware of the meteorite the size of a car or bus that entered Russia early yesterday... It was going at 10-20 miles per second!!!!

 

 

along with the moment the sonic boom made it to ground level:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0cRHsApzt8

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, well.  No screws to be loose here.

 

New brain scanning technique shows the brain as composed of threaded pathways.  Fascinating.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Pop goes the universe.

 

The cyclic theory of the universe, or how we stuck our nose into the LHC debris and learned to love the instability.

[Bdub01 201]

I need to watch more "The Big Bang Theory" before I can wrap my mind around this physics stuff!

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I need to watch more "The Big Bang Theory" before I can wrap my mind around this physics stuff!

About a year of back issues of Scientific American would beat any TV show.

[Bdub01 201]

I need to watch more "The Big Bang Theory" before I can wrap my mind around this physics stuff!

About a year of back issues of Scientific American would beat any TV show.

Yeah but it's not as funny as TBBT

[Morbx 16]

This is Hoag's object, the prototype for ring-galaxies. That ring of black is true empty space, not gravitational lensing or some other weird thing. It's empty, intergalactic medium inside a galaxy. 

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

New satellites to look for NEOs and space junk.

 

I don't think it makes much sense to try an launch anything into orbit from the latitudes of Canada.  An equatorial site makes a better choice.  The payload of this launch is multinational.

[astronelson 339]

New satellites to look for NEOs and space junk.

 

I don't think it makes much sense to try an launch anything into orbit from the latitudes of Canada.  An equatorial site makes a better choice.  The payload of this launch is multinational.

 

It doesn't make sense to launch from Canada, which is why it's being launched from India.

[Zukunftstraume 220]

I need to watch more "The Big Bang Theory" before I can wrap my mind around this physics stuff!

 

You plan on learning about complex physics by watching a CBS comedy?

[Bdub01 201]

I need to watch more "The Big Bang Theory" before I can wrap my mind around this physics stuff!

You plan on learning about complex physics by watching a CBS comedy?

Lmao!!! You gotta start somewhere

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, you could start with Newton's Principia Mathematica and move forward.  How's your Latin?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

New pathogens?

 

I hope the Russians are being ultra-careful with this life form they've dug up.  Who knows what effect it would have on existing life forms if were released into the environment?

[Duke87 1,070]

Underground channels on Mars.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Aha!  The canals of Mars.  Watch out, the Old Ones might be living down there.

[Easy Bakes 253]

thats great .

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Higgs -ldy piggldy.

 

Now they are talking about the properties of this particle, and in the same breath imply that there might be a family of them.  The Standard Model is in great danger.  One Higgs boson fits it nicely, but if there is more than one?  Well, the devil is in the details, eh?

[Easy Bakes 253]

Answer one question you get to ask at least 3 more

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Isn't that the way science goes?  The more you find out, the less you know and the wider vistas open before you.

[AIX 270]

New satellites to look for NEOs and space junk.

 

I don't think it makes much sense to try an launch anything into orbit from the latitudes of Canada.  An equatorial site makes a better choice.  The payload of this launch is multinational.

 

Is that perhaps why the United States chose Florida as its launch site? Sounds like something for me to Wiki...

 

I found a Facebook page called "I Blerping Love Science" that always posts awesome and amazing new scientific discoveries such as the discovery that a certain bumble bee sting can help cure HIV. If you don't mind the expletive in the page's title, it is WELL worth a look!

[Evandad 109]

@AIX: It's amazing what nature can do, isn't it?

 

 

Google? MIning? IN SPACE?! Asteroid mining is achievable( but far fetched if you want it to be profitable by 2020). It might be just a bit of a danger to earth-based industry though, considering that one asteroid could contain more ores than ever mined in mankind's history.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Since we don't have an economic way to get out of earth's gravity well, I don't expect this to go anywhere anytime soon.  Its all pie in the sky.

[astronelson 339]

Getting into a circular orbit is most of the delta-v requirement of getting out of the gravity well. Escape velocity from any altitude is the square root of 2 times the circular orbital velocity at that altitude.
 

Of course, fuel requirements go up faster than velocity does - you need to lift all that fuel into orbit to start with, of course. But it's not prohibitively expensive for large companies to think about undertaking. Heck, it's less than, say, a few dozen large passenger aircraft (a Boeing 747-8 is about $350 million, not including fuel costs).

 

From 1958 to 2011, NASA cost the US taxpayer an estimated total of $790 billion, adjusted for inflation (2,260 Boeing 747-8's). The US military budget for 2012 alone was between $1,000 billion and $1,400 billion (which does include a contribution from NASA on the order of $3 billion to $8 billion). The upper end of this estimate would fund NASA for about a century.

[Easy Bakes 253]

but how do they get the product back to earth?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Heat shielded capsules and parachutes.