Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
- Carl Sagan
June 2010
There’s a good chance that solar flares will send large amounts of magnetic energy our way soon — “sometime around 2013″ (let’s ignore that the popular doomsday, December 21st 2012, falls within that time frame). This solar storm could knock out power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications — well, anything sensitive to electromagnetic disturbance.
Normally, I’d be more than a tad skeptical, but here’s what Richard Fisher of NASA’s Heliophysics Division has to say:
The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity. At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we’re getting together to discuss.
The Telegraph elaborates:
Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years. Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation. He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely. A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.
Of course, the important question here is whether the iPad is resistant to these solar storms, or if such technology — let’s call it ‘Flare Guard’ — will be introduced through a software update to the Retina Display at a later stage. I’ve reached out to Steve Jobs for a comment, but have not yet received a response.
This is how it looks when a spacecraft like Hayabusa enters the Earth’s atmosphere:
Sparkles!
A group of astronomers from NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and other organizations had a front row seat to observe the Hayabusa spacecraft’s fiery plunge into Earth’s atmosphere. The team flew aboard NASA’s DC-8 airborne laboratory, packed with cameras and other imaging instruments, to capture the high-speed re-entry over an unpopulated area of central Australia on June 13, 2010. The Japanese spacecraft completed its seven-year, 1.25 billion mile journey to return a sample of the asteroid Itokawa.
From NASA APOD:
Perhaps the original spiral nebula, M51 is a large galaxy, over 60,000 light-years across, with a readily apparent spiral structure. Also cataloged as NGC 5194, M51 is a part of a well-known interacting galaxy pair, its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweeping in front of companion galaxy NGC 5195 (top). This dramatically processed color composite combines M51 image data from the Calar Alto Observatory’s 1.2 meter telescope. The data include long exposures through a narrow hydrogen alpha filter that trace emission from atomic hydrogen. Reddish hydrogen emission regions, called HII regions, are the regions of intense star formation seen to lie mainly along M51′s bright spiral arms. Intriguingly, this composite also shows red hydrogen emission structures in the faint features extending even beyond NGC 5195, toward the top of the frame.
Credit: CAHA, Descubre Foundation, DSA, OAUV, Vicent Peris (OAUV / PixInsight), Jack Harvey (SSRO), Steven Mazlin (SSRO), Carlos Sonnenstein (Valkanik), Juan Conejero (PixInsight).
Zoomed to 6.066e+228 (2^760), this Mandelbrot fractal, which took 6 months to render, will make your room spin around if you stare at it long enough. To put things in perspective: An electron needs to be zoomed to 1E42 to equal the size of the known universe. This is zoomed to 1E228:
If the music isn’t your taste, disable it by dragging left on the rightmost bars in the player.
Two days to set up, and then six months to render, resulted in around forty 1.9GB uncompressed .AVI files. I added watermarking, fx and time remapping, before multi-pass encoding the 80GB video in h264 (32,768 kbit/sec) and the audio in AAC.
Want some perspective?
- 1E6 Vancouver Island
- 1E9 Jupiter’s radius
- 1E12 Earth’s orbit
- 1E18 distance to Alpha Centauri
- 1E21 Milky Way galaxy
- 1E30 large doesn’t cover it!
- 1E42 size of electron to the universe
- 1E228 incomprehensibly big…but we did it!
For the record, 1 to 6e228 is like expanding a proton to 70000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000 times the size of the visible universe.
(Proton has 1 femtometer diameter, universe has 93 billion light year diameter)
If you were actually traveling into the fractal, you would be moving faster than the speed of light.
Credit: Teamfresh
Super Mario Bros. X is a massive project that blends elements from Super Mario 1, 2, 3 and World. It has many power ups, such as the Hammer Suit, Tanooki Suit, Kuribo’s shoe, The Billy Gun, and many old and new Yoshis. You can also play the game with a friend in the 2 player co-op mode, where the screen seamlessly splits and combines as the players separate and rejoin:
SMBX is most notable for its extensive editor that allows you to create almost any kind of level that you can imagine. The real time editor lets you edit the level while playing it! You can also create your own episode using either the SMB3 or SMW styled world map, or you can create a Mario 64 style hub level and have the players collect stars to advance.
Download the game here!
Honorable mentions to Super Mario Crossover which brings characters like Mega Man and Link (and their abilities) to Mario.
From NASA APOD:
This helmet-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages is popularly called Thor’s Helmet. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor’s Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the helmet is actually more like an interstellar bubble, blown as a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble’s center sweeps through a surrounding molecular cloud. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. Cataloged as NGC 2359, the nebula is located about 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Canis Major. The sharp image, made using broadband and narrowband filters, captures striking details of the nebula’s filamentary structures. It shows off a blue-green color from strong emission due to oxygen atoms in the glowing gas.
Credit: Star Shadows Remote Observatory and PROMPT/UNC
Here’s some perspective for you. A TED talk by Brian Cox on why we should refrain from ever thinking that we know “enough”, and why explorers are paramount to the development of our species:
He cites my favorite speech by Carl Sagan, the Pale Blue Dot commencement address, as well as Humphry Davy:
Nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate, that our triumphs are complete, that there are no mysteries in nature, and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
From NASA APOD:
Active galaxy NGC 1275 is the central, dominant member of the large and relatively nearby Perseus Cluster of Galaxies. Wild-looking at visible wavelengths, the active galaxy is also a prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission. NGC 1275 accretes matter as entire galaxies fall into it, ultimately feeding a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. This color composite image, recreated from archival Hubble Space Telescope data, highlights the resulting galactic debris and filaments of glowing gas, some up to 20,000 light-years long. The filaments persist in NGC 1275, even though the turmoil of galactic collisions should destroy them. What keeps the filaments together? Observations indicate that the structures, pushed out from the galaxy’s center by the black hole’s activity, are held together by magnetic fields. Also known as Perseus A, NGC 1275 spans over 100,000 light years and lies about 230 million light years away.
Credit: Data – Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing – Al Kelly
You’ll notice that almost every comment is favorable. Why? It could be that there’s been a turn-around since the new administration was introduced. Or it might be that in order to post a message to Bush’s wall, you first have to ‘Like’ him. What a happy coincidence for someone who is famous for saying, “You’re either with me or against me.”