May 15, 2013 | 40 notes

View From the Top of the Washington Monument

If you’re scared of heights this video isn’t for you. On May 13, workers wore helmet cams as they repaired the last of the scaffolding around the 555-foot-tall monument. The next step is to wrap fabric around the monument and attach lights. The damage caused by the August 2011 earthquake should be completed in 2014.

Ed note: How engineers investigated the Washington Monument from hundreds of feet above the ground.

h/t WAMU

February 6, 2013 | 316 notes

New Photos Shows Stars on the Brink of Death and the Precipice of Life

Space added several stunning new images to its photo album this week, including the one above of spiral galaxy M106, located 23.5 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, Notice something?

The image, released yesterday, actually contains two spirals overlain on each other. One is the cloudy, blue-white spiral with a yellow core. The core itself is a composite of images take by the Hubble Space Telescope‘s Advanced Camera for Surveys, Wide Field Camera 3, and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 detectors. Spiraling outward, the cloudy arms also come from Hubble, but were colorized with ground-based images captured from relatively small telescopes (12.5-inch and 20-inch) as they imaged from dark, remote sites in New Mexico. The telescopes, owned by photo-astronomers Robert Gendler and R. Jay GaBany, helped these astronomy enthusiasts fill in gaps left by Hubble’s cameras. The images were meticulously assembled into a mosaic by Gendler, a physician by training, to form the base spiral of the photo illustration above

But what about the second spiral? Emanating at odd angles is a glowing red swirl, known as the “anomalous arms” of M106, These arms, captured by Hubble imagery and GaBany’s telescope, are enormous streamers of irradiated hydrogen gas molecules which glow red when seen through special filters. This begs the question–what’s cooking the hydrogen

The answer is…a black hole! As astronomer Phil Plait blogs in Slate, “Every big galaxy has a supermassive black hole in its core. The Milky Way has one, and it has about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. The black hole at M106’s heart is about 30 million times the mass of our Sun. Besides being heftier it’s also actively feeding, gobbling down material swirling around it (our own galaxy’s black hole is quiescent; that is, not eating anything at the moment).

While this photo shows stars at the brink of death within M106, another photo released yesterday shows the environment of stars at their birth

Tinged an eerie green–like smoke from a witch’s brew–the new image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was taken after zooming in on bright dot in the “sword” of the constellation Orion. Visible to the naked eye as a single fuzzy star (also known as M42), the dot is actually a cluster of stars, surrounded by the Orion nebula. Here, stars are born

The image captures the infrared nimbus formed as newborn stars are compressed from vast clouds of gas and heat the wisps that remain. White regions are the hottest part of these stars’ first dust bath, while greens and reds show lukewarm dust. Carving holes through the dust are massive stars–newly formed–such as the one seen at the picture’s center

The Orion nebula is a site of star formation close to the Earth, giving scientists the opportunity to study its characteristics and hypothesize on how our Sun was born five billion years ago, perhaps from a similar cloud of dust. The white orbs seen here are less than 10 million years old

The images of the death and birth of stars–both hauntingly beautiful–showcase the evolving nature of space. Mirrored by our own cycles of life and death, the pictures help to link our daily grind with the vastness beyond Earth.

January 28, 2013 | 207 notes

Iran Sends Terrified Monkey to Space Iran claims to have sent a rocket into sub-orbital space with a small monkey on board. The photo, released by Iranian state media, shows the monkey after its “safe” return to Earth. - Read more at WashingtonPost.com. Photo by: Mashregnews.ir Ed note: Ever wonder what types of animals have been to space? The answer is quite surprising.

Iran Sends Terrified Monkey to Space

Iran claims to have sent a rocket into sub-orbital space with a small monkey on board. The photo, released by Iranian state media, shows the monkey after its “safe” return to Earth. - Read more at WashingtonPost.com.

Photo by: Mashregnews.ir

Ed note: Ever wonder what types of animals have been to space? The answer is quite surprising.

January 24, 2013 | 271 notes

African Dung Beetles Navigate at Night Using the Milky Way Science has shown us that a number of organisms use the stars for navigation: songbirds, harbor seals and, of course, humans. But a new study by a team of Swedish and South African researchers published today in the journal Cell Biology indicates that a rather unexpected creature can be added to this list—the lowly dung beetle. The beetles are known for creating small balls made of animal feces (i.e. dung) and rolling them in straight lines over long distances. They do this because the dung is their main food source—and other beetles often try to steal the dung once it’s been rolled into a ball. The surest way of retaining the valuable dung once it’s been packed into a ball is to move it away from the original dung pile as quickly as possible. Researchers, though, have long been mystified by the tiny beetles’ ability to roll the dung balls in straight lines at night. “Even on clear, moonless nights, many dung beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths,” said lead author Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden. “This led us to suspect that the beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation—a feat that had, to our knowledge, never before been demonstrated in an insect.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo courtesy of Current Biology, Dacke et. al.

African Dung Beetles Navigate at Night Using the Milky Way

Science has shown us that a number of organisms use the stars for navigation: songbirds, harbor seals and, of course, humans. But a new study by a team of Swedish and South African researchers published today in the journal Cell Biology indicates that a rather unexpected creature can be added to this list—the lowly dung beetle.

The beetles are known for creating small balls made of animal feces (i.e. dung) and rolling them in straight lines over long distances. They do this because the dung is their main food source—and other beetles often try to steal the dung once it’s been rolled into a ball. The surest way of retaining the valuable dung once it’s been packed into a ball is to move it away from the original dung pile as quickly as possible.

Researchers, though, have long been mystified by the tiny beetles’ ability to roll the dung balls in straight lines at night. “Even on clear, moonless nights, many dung beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths,” said lead author Marie Dacke of Lund University in Sweden. “This led us to suspect that the beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation—a feat that had, to our knowledge, never before been demonstrated in an insect.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo courtesy of Current Biology, Dacke et. al.

January 3, 2013 | 36 notes

Is the Internet Turning Us Into a Nation of Hate-Filled Trolls? It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls. Surprisingly, [Jaron] Lanier tells me it first came to him when he recognized his own inner troll—for instance, when he’d find himself shamefully taking pleasure when someone he knew got attacked online. “I definitely noticed it happening to me,” he recalled. “We’re not as different from one another as we’d like to imagine. So when we look at this pathetic guy in Texas who was just outed as ‘Violentacrez’…I don’t know if you followed it?” “I did.” “Violentacrez” was the screen name of a notorious troll on the popular site Reddit. He was known for posting “images of scantily clad underage girls…[and] an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore” and more, according to the Gawker.com reporter who exposed his real name, shaming him and evoking consternation among some Reddit users who felt that this use of anonymity was inseparable from freedom of speech somehow. “So it turns out Violencacrez is this guy with a disabled wife who’s middle-aged and he’s kind of a Walter Mitty—someone who wants to be significant, wants some bit of Nietzschean spark to his life.” Only Lanier would attribute Nietzschean longing to Violentacrez. “And he’s not that different from any of us. The difference is that he’s scared and possibly hurt a lot of people.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo of Jaron Lanier by: Robert Holmgren

Is the Internet Turning Us Into a Nation of Hate-Filled Trolls?

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

Surprisingly, [Jaron] Lanier tells me it first came to him when he recognized his own inner troll—for instance, when he’d find himself shamefully taking pleasure when someone he knew got attacked online. “I definitely noticed it happening to me,” he recalled. “We’re not as different from one another as we’d like to imagine. So when we look at this pathetic guy in Texas who was just outed as ‘Violentacrez’…I don’t know if you followed it?”

“I did.” “Violentacrez” was the screen name of a notorious troll on the popular site Reddit. He was known for posting “images of scantily clad underage girls…[and] an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore” and more, according to the Gawker.com reporter who exposed his real name, shaming him and evoking consternation among some Reddit users who felt that this use of anonymity was inseparable from freedom of speech somehow.

“So it turns out Violencacrez is this guy with a disabled wife who’s middle-aged and he’s kind of a Walter Mitty—someone who wants to be significant, wants some bit of Nietzschean spark to his life.”

Only Lanier would attribute Nietzschean longing to Violentacrez. “And he’s not that different from any of us. The difference is that he’s scared and possibly hurt a lot of people.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo of Jaron Lanier by: Robert Holmgren

December 21, 2012 | 45 notes

Marijuana Isn’t a Pain Killer—It’s a Pain Distracter One of the chief arguments for the legalization of medicinal marijuana is its usefulness as a pain reliever. For many cancer and AIDS patients across the 19 states where medicinal use of the drug has been legalized, it has proven to be a valuable tool in managing chronic pain—in some cases working for patients for which conventional painkillers are ineffective. To determine exactly how cannabis relieves pain, a group of Oxford researchers used healthy volunteers, an MRI machine and doses of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Their findings, published today in the journal Pain, suggest something counterintuitive: that the drug doesn’t so much reduce pain as make the same level of pain more bearable. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Coleen Danger.

Marijuana Isn’t a Pain Killer—It’s a Pain Distracter

One of the chief arguments for the legalization of medicinal marijuana is its usefulness as a pain reliever. For many cancer and AIDS patients across the 19 states where medicinal use of the drug has been legalized, it has proven to be a valuable tool in managing chronic pain—in some cases working for patients for which conventional painkillers are ineffective.

To determine exactly how cannabis relieves pain, a group of Oxford researchers used healthy volunteers, an MRI machine and doses of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Their findings, published today in the journal Pain, suggest something counterintuitive: that the drug doesn’t so much reduce pain as make the same level of pain more bearable. - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Coleen Danger.

December 11, 2012 | 48 notes

“Higher Education Should Be A Basic Human Right” - Sebastian Thrun This is the headquarters of Udacity, billed as the “21st-century university,” where [Sebastian] Thrun is taking his next big crack at the next big problem: education. While he still spends a day a week at Google, where he is a fellow, and remains an unpaid research professor at Stanford University (his wife, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, is a professor in comparative literature), Udacity is the place the 45-year-old, German-born roboticist calls home. Udacity has its roots in the experience Thrun had in 2011 when he and Peter Norvig opened the course they were teaching at Stanford, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” to the world via the Internet. “I was shocked by the number of responses,” he says. The class made the New York Times a few months later, and enrollment surged from 58,000 to 160,000. “I remember going to a Lady Gaga concert at the time and thinking, ‘I have more students in my class than you do in your concert,’ ” Thrun says. But it wasn’t just numbers, it was who was taking the class: “People wrote me these heartbreaking e-mails by the thousands. They were people from all walks of life—business people, high-school kids, retired people, people on dialysis.” Thrun, whose demeanor is a blend of continental sang-froid and Silicon Valley sunniness (he peppers the precise speech you might expect from a German roboticist with intensifiers like “super” and “insanely”), had a moment: “I realized, ‘Wow, I’m reaching people that really need my help.’ ” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photo by: Ethan Hill / Composite Image: NASA; Google; Udacity Ed note: Our American Ingenuity Awards page features many more inspirational people.

“Higher Education Should Be A Basic Human Right” - Sebastian Thrun

This is the headquarters of Udacity, billed as the “21st-century university,” where [Sebastian] Thrun is taking his next big crack at the next big problem: education. While he still spends a day a week at Google, where he is a fellow, and remains an unpaid research professor at Stanford University (his wife, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, is a professor in comparative literature), Udacity is the place the 45-year-old, German-born roboticist calls home.

Udacity has its roots in the experience Thrun had in 2011 when he and Peter Norvig opened the course they were teaching at Stanford, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” to the world via the Internet. “I was shocked by the number of responses,” he says. The class made the New York Times a few months later, and enrollment surged from 58,000 to 160,000. “I remember going to a Lady Gaga concert at the time and thinking, ‘I have more students in my class than you do in your concert,’ ” Thrun says. But it wasn’t just numbers, it was who was taking the class: “People wrote me these heartbreaking e-mails by the thousands. They were people from all walks of life—business people, high-school kids, retired people, people on dialysis.” Thrun, whose demeanor is a blend of continental sang-froid and Silicon Valley sunniness (he peppers the precise speech you might expect from a German roboticist with intensifiers like “super” and “insanely”), had a moment: “I realized, ‘Wow, I’m reaching people that really need my help.’ ” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photo by: Ethan Hill / Composite Image: NASA; Google; Udacity

Ed note: Our American Ingenuity Awards page features many more inspirational people.

December 10, 2012 | 410 notes

Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society Bryan Stevenson’s effort began with detailed research: Among more than 2,000 juveniles (age 17 or younger) who had been sentenced to life in prison without parole, he and staff members at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the nonprofit law firm he established in 1989, documented 73 involving defendants as young as 13 and 14. Children of color, he found, tended to be sentenced more harshly. “The data made clear that the criminal justice system was not protecting children, as is done in every other area of law,” he says. So he began developing legal arguments “that these condemned children were still children.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com. Photograph by: Steve Liss Ed note: Our American Ingenuity Awards page has more on Bryan Stevenson and the other inspirational winners.

Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society

Bryan Stevenson’s effort began with detailed research: Among more than 2,000 juveniles (age 17 or younger) who had been sentenced to life in prison without parole, he and staff members at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), the nonprofit law firm he established in 1989, documented 73 involving defendants as young as 13 and 14. Children of color, he found, tended to be sentenced more harshly.

“The data made clear that the criminal justice system was not protecting children, as is done in every other area of law,” he says. So he began developing legal arguments “that these condemned children were still children.” - Continue reading at Smithsonian.com.

Photograph by: Steve Liss

Ed note: Our American Ingenuity Awards page has more on Bryan Stevenson and the other inspirational winners.

December 6, 2012 | 45 notes

Real-Time Simulation of Life and Death in the United States Nowhere Near Ithica has created a real-time simulation that shows the beginning and end of life. The simulation uses data from the United States Census Bureau but is not an exact representation of what’s happening at every moment. Ed note: Enjoy interactive maps? Here is one of every war in history. h/t The Verge

Real-Time Simulation of Life and Death in the United States

Nowhere Near Ithica has created a real-time simulation that shows the beginning and end of life. The simulation uses data from the United States Census Bureau but is not an exact representation of what’s happening at every moment.

Ed note: Enjoy interactive maps? Here is one of every war in history.

h/t The Verge