Jawaan!

The Crab Pulsar, this city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second, with a magnetic force one trillion times that of the Earth lies at the center of this composite image of the inner region of the well-known Crab Nebula. The pulsar is the engine powering and lighting the entire 9-light-year wide nebula: sending powerful bursts of energy every 1/30th of a second along along the entire electromagnetic spectrum from gamma rays to radio blowing a violent wind near the speed of light.  There are some 1500 identified neutron stars in the Universe, with many more either hidden or dissipated.

A “universe in a test tube” that could be used to prove theories of everything was created by physicists using liquid helium and a magnetic field to build a finger-sized representation of the early cosmos. “In effect, we have made a universe in a test tube,” said Richard Haley of Lancaster University The low-temperature team at Great Britain’s Lancaster University may have found a laboratory test of the ‘untestable’ string theory, made popular by Brian Greene at Columbia University. Within string theory, a brane is a large surface embedded in higher dimensional space — our Universe could occupy such a brane.

It turns out that we don’t know everything about the universe.  Shocking, we know, but you’d be surprised how often science writers, politicians, or intelligent design advocates confuse “non-omniscience” with “everything is WRONG!”  Now some are saying that Newton screwed up, but at least their evidence is awesome: dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way! First off, Newton was never “wrong” – he was “right as far as it was humanly possible to be in the seventeenth century.”  You have to remember that he defined all the motion he ever saw with a pencil, and when he discovered the math didn’t exist he just spent a chunk of his life inventing it – meanwhile, we use a supercomputer system to watch cats falling out of trees. There wasn’t a lot of near-light-speed motion at the time, nor any neutrinos, and it’s important to remember that the people who build bridges don’t go with general relativity or quantum mechanics – it’s all the three laws of force, baby.  You only find you need further theorios when you look outside, and Professor Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn and colleagues have looked as outside as you can reasonably get:  analyzing the motions of dwarf galaxies, thousands of starts orbiting the entire Milky Way.  There they’ve found some fascinating contradictions. Instead of being uniformly distributed around the Milky Way, the dwarf galaxies orbit in a plane – almost like a set of planets.  The group’s calculations show that these galaxettes can’t contain any dark matter – but then, observations of the orbital speed of the same shows that they MUST contain dark matter, as the extant material isn’t enough to explain their velocities

“I can hear DNA on the internet.”  No, it’s not Philip K.

Like the Gemini twins of Greek mythology, the Gemini Observatory’s twin optical/infrared telescopes are an ocean apart, yet together they can access the entire sky. Gemini South is located at almost 9,000 feet in the Chilean Andes; Gemini North (pictured) sits atop the dormant volcano Mauna Kea, home to an international community of telescopes peering at the night skies through Hawaii’s atmosphere.

Patagonia’s Founder on Why There’s “No Such Thing as Sustainability” If you get down to the real causes, a lot of our society’s biggest problems are happening because we’re destroying the planet.

After an unbelievable 10 months away, I returned home at the beginning of July. Sorry for the delay in posting this, it’s been an incredibly hectic couple of weeks seeing family and friends, not to mention settling back in. Packed quite a bit of sightseeing into the final few weeks after semester ended before returning to London for the flight home to Brisbane, Australia