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Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in the Milky Way | Universe Today
NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.
Where did all these monkeys come from? – Fossil teeth may hint at an Asian origin for anthropoid primates | Wired Science | Wired.com
Where did anthropoid primates come from? This question has not been an easy one to answer.
Pretty great summary article of the evidence about anthropoid origins.
symmetry breaking » Blog Archive » The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements
Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer.
Four Big Ideas from the Open Science Summit 2010
Our new vision for CoLab is to enable scientific debate around any piece of scientific content. We want to make it stupid easy to center a discussion around protocols, data, plots, published papers, papers in progress, simulations, code, or any other component of scientific research. As an experimentalist, I should be able to import a lab protocol, raw data, or manipulable plots based on a live feed from that raw data and discuss it online with collaborators across the globe. As a computational scientist, I should be able to import code or live simulations and troubleshoot online with anyone in the world who might be able to help. As a member of a journal club, I should be able to import a published paper and collaboratively highlight and annotate in-line with colleagues, from those in the lab next door to those in another country. As a researcher ready to publish, I should be able to host a working version of my paper online, collaboratively edit with any of my colleagues, and submit a link directly to a journal, without being forced to download the paper and make finishing touches offline. In short, as a scientist, I should be able to easily and openly discuss any piece of my science with my entire scientific community.
Interesting vision. CoLab is something to keep a close eye on.
Astronomers find a 300 solar mass star
The team found several stars with surface temperatures over 40 000 degrees — more than seven times hotter than our Sun — and a few tens of times larger and several million times brighter. Comparisons with models imply that several of these stars were born with masses in excess of 150 solar masses. The star R136a1, found in the R136 cluster, is the most massive star ever found, with a current mass of about 265 solar masses and with a birth mass of as much as 320 times that of the Sun.
Report: Toxins found in whales bode ill for humans - Yahoo! News
A report released Thursday noted high levels of cadmium, aluminum, chromium, lead, silver, mercury and titanium in tissue samples taken by dart gun from nearly 1,000 whales over five years. From polar areas to equatorial waters, the whales ingested pollutants that may have been produced by humans thousands of miles away, the researchers said.
"These contaminants, I think, are threatening the human food supply. They certainly are threatening the whales and the other animals that live in the ocean," said biologist Roger Payne, founder and president of Ocean Alliance, the research and conservation group that produced the report.
David Brin's Earth seems almost optimistic nowadays.
How far did Tom Petty free fall? | damonkohler
This evening, Laura and I listened to Tom Petty's "Free Falling"and became curious about just how far he free falls during the song.
Can't argue with that. On his greatest hits album, I think Felix Baumgartner actually guested on that song. (Brought to you by Red Bull.)
Library of Congress holds conference on origins of portolan charts
The earliest known portolan (PORT-oh-lawn) chart, the Carta Pisana, just appears in about 1275 -- with no known predecessors. It is perhaps the first modern scientific map and contrasted sharply to the "mappamundi" of the era, the colorful maps with unrecognizable geography and fantastic creatures and legends. It bears no resemblance to the methods of the mathematician Ptolemy and does not use measurements of longitude and latitude.
And yet, despite it's stunning accuracy, the map "seems to have emerged full-blown from the seas it describes," one reference journal notes. No one today knows who made the first maps, or how they calculated distance so accurately, or even how all the information came to be compiled.
Researchers race to produce 3D models of BP oil spill - Computerworld
The project is getting a "high priority," said Clint Dawson, professors of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas, and one of the researchers. "What our model can do that a lot of the other models can't do is actually track the oil spill up into marshes and the wetlands because we have fine scale resolution in those areas - that's our main concern.
An emergency allocation of one million SU on Ranger for simulating the Oil Spill.
Voyager 2 stops making sense
According to a statement released by the JPL, the problem first became apparent on April 22nd. Data from the scientific transmission, which currently reports on the conditions at the very edge of the solar system, began coming through with improper formatting, making it impossible to interpret the contents. Engineering data is still intelligible, so the JPL staff is expecting that it will be possible to figure out what's going wrong and introduce a fix. Serious attempts at repair were delayed by a planned roll maneuver, and only started on Friday. With a round-trip time of over a day, however, progress will undoubtedly be slow.
Still, optimism springs eternal at NASA. If it's deterministically corrupted in memory, it's possible they could post-process it.
