Tag: excerpt (page 3 of 36)

Super Alien Civilizations: What Do They Really Want?

May 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comHighly advanced aliens seem MIA, according to a recent study by astronomers at Penn State University. These researchers checked out a huge gob of cosmic real estate -- roughly 100,000 galaxies -- and failed to find cl...

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5 Ways to Master the Art of Letting Go

May 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comWe've all had to let go of things at some point or another. Whether it be a pet, friend, boyfriend, or simply graduating high school. We are constantly ending chapters in order to start new chapters.Though age and expe...

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Hubble Finds Giant Halo Around the Andromeda Galaxy

May 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments





 Excerpt from hubblesite.org

Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the immense halo of gas enveloping the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest massive galactic neighbor, is about six times larger and 1,000 times more massive than previously measured. The dark, nearly invisible halo stretches about a million light-years from its host galaxy, halfway to our own Milky Way galaxy. This finding promises to tell astronomers more about the evolution and structure of majestic giant spirals, one of the most common types of galaxies in the universe.

"Halos are the gaseous atmospheres of galaxies. The properties of these gaseous halos control the rate at which stars form in galaxies according to models of galaxy formation," explained the lead investigator, Nicolas Lehner of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. The gargantuan halo is estimated to contain half the mass of the stars in the Andromeda galaxy itself, in the form of a hot, diffuse gas. If it could be viewed with the naked eye, the halo would be 100 times the diameter of the full Moon in the sky. This is equivalent to the patch of sky covered by two basketballs held at arm's length.

The Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, lies 2.5 million light-years away and looks like a faint spindle, about 6 times the diameter of the full Moon. It is considered a near-twin to the Milky Way galaxy.

Because the gas in Andromeda's halo is dark, the team looked at bright background objects through the gas and observed how the light changed. This is a bit like looking at a glowing light at the bottom of a pool at night. The ideal background "lights" for such a study are quasars, which are very distant bright cores of active galaxies powered by black holes. The team used 18 quasars residing far behind Andromeda to probe how material is distributed well beyond the visible disk of the galaxy. Their findings were published in the May 10, 2015, edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

Earlier research from Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS)-Halos program studied 44 distant galaxies and found halos like Andromeda's, but never before has such a massive halo been seen in a neighboring galaxy. Because the previously studied galaxies were much farther away, they appeared much smaller on the sky. Only one quasar could be detected behind each faraway galaxy, providing only one light anchor point to map their halo size and structure. With its close proximity to Earth and its correspondingly large footprint on the sky, Andromeda provides a far more extensive sampling of a lot of background quasars.
"As the light from the quasars travels toward Hubble, the halo's gas will absorb some of that light and make the quasar appear a little darker in just a very small wavelength range," explains co-investigator J. Christopher Howk, also of Notre Dame. "By measuring the dip in brightness in that range, we can tell how much halo gas from M31 there is between us and that quasar."

The scientists used Hubble's unique capability to study the ultraviolet light from the quasars. Ultraviolet light is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, which makes it difficult to observe with a ground-based telescope. The team drew from about 5 years' worth of observations stored in the Hubble data archive to conduct this research. Many previous Hubble campaigns have used quasars to study gas much farther away than — but in the general direction of — Andromeda, so a treasure trove of data already existed.

But where did the giant halo come from? Large-scale simulations of galaxies suggest that the halo formed at the same time as the rest of Andromeda. The team also determined that it is enriched in elements much heavier than hydrogen and helium, and the only way to get these heavy elements is from exploding stars called supernovae. The supernovae erupt in Andromeda's star-filled disk and violently blow these heavier elements far out into space. Over Andromeda's lifetime, nearly half of all the heavy elements made by its stars have been expelled far beyond the galaxy's 200,000-light-year-diameter stellar disk.

What does this mean for our own galaxy? Because we live inside the Milky Way, scientists cannot determine whether or not such an equally massive and extended halo exists around our galaxy. It's a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. If the Milky Way does possess a similarly huge halo, the two galaxies' halos may be nearly touching already and quiescently merging long before the two massive galaxies collide. Hubble observations indicate that the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies will merge to form a giant elliptical galaxy beginning about 4 billion years from now.

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22 Terrifying and Magical Capabilities Someone Has When You Fall For Them

May 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comLove is terrifying, and terror is love.How exceptional is falling in love? How breathtakingly incredible? How painful and enchanted it is to have your heart opened. It presents so many chances for overwhelming pain, an...

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Carl Sagan’s Solar Sail Goes On Test Flight On May 20: Why You Should Care

May 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt  from techtimes.comMany of the technologies that are in use today such as the airplane and the internet were once ideas that became reality and it appears that this still goes true with the innovations of the future. Take for instance ...

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Your brain will never turn into software on a supercomputer

May 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from io9.com Getting ready to upload your consciousness into a brain-emulating computer in a decade or two? You'll be waiting a lot longer than that. Princeton computer science researcher Timothy B. Lee doesn't think we'll ever upload our ...

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Consciousness Does Not Compute (and Never Will), Says Korean Scientist

May 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Daegene Song's research into strong AI could be key to answering fundamental brain science questions Excerpt from prnewswire.com Within some circles in the scientific community, debate rages about whether computers will achieve technological singulari...

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Listen To These Eerie ‘X-Files’ Sounds Recorded in Earth’s Stratosphere

May 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.comWhat does the edge of space sound like? Pretty darn strange. Just have a listen to these acoustic signals recorded in the stratosphere some 22 miles above Earth's surface (above). At frequencies below 20 hertz, thes...

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Astronomers Giddy Over What They Call A Cosmic ‘Dinosaur Egg’ About To Hatch

May 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments



cosmic dinosaur egg
The Antennae galaxies, shown in visible light in a Hubble image (upper image), were studied with ALMA, revealing extensive clouds of molecular gas (center right image). One cloud (bottom image) is incredibly dense and massive, yet apparently star free, suggesting it is the first example of a prenatal globular cluster ever identified.


Excerpt from huffingtonpost.com

A dense cloud of gas 50 million light-years away has astronomers buzzing, and they're using all sorts of strange metaphors to get the rest of us to pay attention.

They've discovered what they think may be a globular cluster -- a big ball of up to one million stars -- on the verge of being born.

“This remarkable object looks like it was plucked straight out of the very early universe," Dr. Kelsey Johnson, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and lead author on a paper about the research, said in a written statement. "To discover something that has all the characteristics of a globular cluster, yet has not begun making stars, is like finding a dinosaur egg that’s about to hatch.”

cosmic egg
ALMA image of dense cores of molecular gas in the Antennae galaxies. The round yellow object near the center may be the first prenatal example of a globular cluster ever identified. It is surrounded by a giant molecular cloud.


Johnson and her colleagues spotted the bizarre object, which they call the "Firecracker," using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Atacama desert in Chile. It's located inside a pair of interacting galaxies known to scientists as NGC 4038/NGC 4039, or The Antennae Galaxies.

The Firecracker has a mass that's 50 times that of our sun, and is under an enormous amount of pressure -- roughly 10,000 times greater than the average pressure in interstellar space. According to the researchers, this makes it a good candidate for collapsing into a globular cluster within the next million years.

What do other scientists make of the discovery? Dr. Alison Peck, ALMA scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, who was not involved in the new research, called it "important" and said she was "really excited to hear about these results."
She told The Huffington Post in an email:
"One of the things that we all yearn to understand is how our surroundings formed, how our galaxy and our solar system came to be. To do this, since we can’t actually watch things change over time, (it just takes too long), we need to find similar objects at different stages of development and compare them. What Dr. Johnson’s team have found here is an analog of an object that we look for in the very early universe, but they’ve found it so close by that we’ll be able to make extremely detailed observations and find out much more about the physical conditions in this exciting region."
The research is set to be published in the Astrophysical Journal. 

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Mercury’s Mysterious Magnetic Past Goes Back 4 Billion Years

May 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

 Excerpt from sci-tech-today.com Examining rocks on Mercury's surface, scientists using data from NASA's Messenger spacecraft have revealed that the planet probably had a much stronger magnetic field nearly 4 billion years ago.  The fi...

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6 Ways to Overcome a Soul-Crushing Life Challenge

May 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments




Excerpt from huffingtonpost.com

It was never in your life plan, certainly never predicted in your high school yearbook.
And yet, here you are. You've gone through a soul-sucking life experience and are suffering from the collateral consequences. Uncertainty, fear and disbelief rule the day. You keep waiting to wake up and find out this was all a bad dream.
The problem is that wishing, wanting and waiting don't help. Whether you're still in the midst of the storm or idling in the aftermath, the truth is that you have to reach down and make the decision that although you may have had no control over what happened to you, you do have control over how you respond and move forward. These six tips will help start you on that journey:
1. Don't Compare Your Blooper Reel to Other's Highlight Reel
At times it may seem like the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Social media exacerbates this perception because people tend to show only their green patch of lawn and not their backyard full of weeds!
Wouldn't it be refreshing to see someone's perfect vacation pictures captioned: "Don't know how we're really going to pay for this; We're up to our ears in debt! The kids got carsick and puked in the rental car, and Jack and I haven't had sex for weeks! Wish you were here!"
The grass isn't always greener. Everyone has something in life they wish they could undo, redo or erase. They just don't post it on Facebook.
2. Realize That Sometimes You Have No Control Over What Happens to You
Like the saying goes, life is what happens to you when you are making other plans. I truly believe that things happen for you rather than to you to nudge you into growth. When something unexpected happens, ask yourself "What's the lesson here?"
3. Surrender to Your Situation
Surrendering doesn't mean giving in; it simply means you stop fighting the fact that the situation happened. Accept the fact that it occurred, that it sucks, and that yes, it probably was unfair and undeserved.
When you continually try to fight against a situation, it's like trying to swim against a rip current. You can fight it and end up exhausted and pulled out to sea, or you can accept that it is done, swim parallel to it and overcome it. You cannot change what has already occurred but you can change how you respond to it. This is the tipping point to taking your power back.
4. Understand That Your Coping Mechanisms May Be Holding You Hostage
It is natural to feel disbelief, anger and sadness, and to want to blame others for what you are going through. These coping mechanisms are designed to help you deal with the situation at hand. They are also a defense mechanism, a way to push back on the reality of the situation.
The problem is, when you get stuck defending, denying, and blaming, you form an endless loop of negative thoughts that won't stop spinning in your head. The part of your brain that is controlling the loop is your ego. When you learn to harness your ego, you can transform the way you think and move past these self-destructive thoughts.
5. Harness Your Ego
Your ego is part of your consciousness, and it competes with your higher self, or spirit, for control of your thoughts. Your ego is fear-based and your higher self is love-based. The two cannot coexist because the higher self simply does not recognize fear. Think of the ego as the darkness and the higher self as the light switch; once the light goes on darkness cannot exist.
The ego thrives on fear and separation in order to control your thoughts. It causes you to think you need to be better because you're not good enough or are lacking in some way. The egoic brain creates this fear of inferiority and you react by putting others down as a way to raise your sense of self-worth up.
You can recognize your ego at work when you are critical or judgmental of others, when you take on the role of victim, or when you blame others rather than looking inward. When you feel self-important, when you feel the need to be right, and when anger, jealousy, and self-importance take center stage, that's your ego, and it isn't helping you. It creates a false sense of self.
Once you are aware that your ego is talking, you have begun the process of winning the mind chatter war in your head. Your awareness helps you realize that you no longer have to react to the fear it is creating. Your thoughts are not you but are of the ego. Remember that your ego and your higher self cannot co-exist; When you recognize the ego it has to take a back seat to your higher self. You then can move above these thoughts and shift your perspective from negative thoughts to ones that serve you positively.
6. Create Calm and Gratitude
The ego loves for you to focus on your past, on what you lost. What if you shift the way you look at your situation and focus on what you gained as a result?
What did you learn as a result of the trial? Are you more compassionate, less judgmental? Is your house calmer or cleaner? Did you start taking better care of yourself emotionally or physically? Are you finally putting yourself first?
Focusing on what you are grateful for instead of what you lost is a mindset that creates a calmer, happier you. And that is something to be grateful for!
Tired of feeling like you'll never be happy again? Mary Holloway empowers women to reach down and find their inner warrior. Mary is a sought after speaker, resilience coach, and most importantly, a survivor of soul crushing life experiences. She is the founder of Resilience Café and the creator of the Boom Bounce Wow Resilience Method. Mary believes that every woman has an incredible warrior within her that can help her take back her life and emerge better, stronger, happier, and surprisingly thankful for the experience. She knows that women can choose not to be defined by their situation but rather by how they respond to it.
Follow Mary at ResilienceCafe.com...

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Spacecraft Falls From Orbit Over the Pacific, Russia Says

May 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments






Excerpt from nytimes.com

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — An unmanned Russian spaceship loitering in orbit after a failed cargo run to the International Space Station plunged into Earth's atmosphere late on Thursday, the Russian space agency reported.

The capsule, loaded with more than three tons of food, fuel and supplies for the station crew, fell from orbit at 10:04 p.m. Eastern time, the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, said in a statement.
At the time, the Progress-59 spacecraft was flying over the central Pacific Ocean, the statement said.

Most of the spacecraft was expected to burn up during its high-speed descent through the atmosphere, but small pieces of the structure could have survived and splashed down in the ocean.
“Only a few small pieces of structural elements could reach the planet's surface,” Roscosmos said in a statement earlier Thursday — similar to what happens at the end of routine Progress cargo missions.

The freighter was launched on April 28 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, but never made to the station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles above the earth.

Ground controllers lost contact with the Progress spaceship shortly after it separated from the upper stage of its Soyuz rocket about nine minutes after launch.

An investigation into the failed mission is underway, Roscosmos said. Russia has flown 62 Progress spacecraft to the station to deliver modules and cargo, two of which were not successful.
Various versions of the Progress freighters have been flying since 1978, supporting previous Soviet-era stations including Salyut 6, Salyut 7 and Mir. The capsules are designed to burn up in the atmosphere after delivering their cargo.

The United States hired privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, and Orbital ATK to fly cargo to the station after the space shuttles were retired in 2011. SpaceX's missions have all been successful.

Orbital lost a cargo ship in October after a failed launch. Europe flew five ATV freighters to the station, all successfully, but has no plans to fly more. Japan is preparing for its fifth HTV cargo flight in August.

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What astronomers learned when Messenger space probe crashed into Mercury

May 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments



Excerpt from statecolumn.com


On April 30, NASA concluded an historic voyage known as the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging mission. The mission came to an end when the spacecraft carrying analytical instruments, Messenger, crashed into the planet’s surface after consuming all of its fuel.
The mission was far from a waste, however, as NASA rarely expects to see the majority of the spacecraft they launch ever again. According to Discovery, The probe sent back a spectacular photo of the surface of Mercury, using the craft’s Narrow Angle Camera in tandem with the Mercury Dual Imaging System. The photo shows a mile-wide view of the nearby planet’s surface in 2.1 meters per pixel resolution.
Right after the probe delivered the photo to NASA’s Deep Space Network, which is a collection of global radio antennae that tracks data on the agency’s robotic missions around the solar system, the signal was lost in what scientists assume was the craft’s final contact with the closest planet to the sun.
The four-year mission came to an end when the craft could no longer maintain its orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet due to lack of fuel. Mercury is just 36 miles from the sun, compared to Earth, which is 93 million miles away from the center of the solar system. Mercury is a peculiar world, with both frigid and extremely hot temperatures. Messenger also revealed that Mercury has a magnetic field similar to that of Earth’s, created by the motion of metallic fluids within the planet’s core.
The main challenge the Messenger mission faced was getting the space probe into orbit around Mercury. Due to the planet’s proximity to the sun, it was extremely difficult for flight engineers to avoid its gravitational pull. In addition to the challenge of catching Mercury’s comparatively weak gravitational force, high temperatures also made things tricky. Messenger was equipped with a sunshield designed to protect the spaceship cool on the side that faced the sun. NASA engineers also attempted to chart a long, elliptical orbit around Mercury, giving Messenger time to cool off as it rounded the backside of the planet.
Messenger made over 4,000 orbits around Mercury between 2011 and 2015, many more than the originally planned one-year mission would allow.
With the close-up shots of Mercury’s surface provided by Messenger, NASA scientists were able to detect trace signals of magnetic activity in Mercury’s crust. Using clues from the number of impact craters on the surface, scientists figured that Mercury’s magnetized regions could be as old as 3.7 billion years. Astronomers count the craters on a planet in order to estimate its age – the logic being that younger surfaces should have fewer impact sites than older surfaces.
The data sent back by Messenger has caused astronomers to reconsider their understanding of Mercury’s magnetic history. They now date the beginning of magnetism on Mercury to about 700 million years after the planet was formed. They cannot say for sure, however, if the magnetic field has been consistently active over this timeframe.
According to Messenger guest investigator Catherine Johnson, geophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, that it was possible the magnetic field has been active under constant conditions, though she suspects it might also oscillate over time, like Earth’s. Information for the time period between 4 billion years ago and present day is sparse, though Johnson added that additional research is in the pipeline.
Johnson was pleased, however, with the insight offered into Mercury’s formation provided by these new magnetic clues. Magnetism on a planetary scale typically indicates a liquid metal interior. Since Mercury is so tiny, scientists originally believed that its center would be solid, due to the rate of cooling. The presence of liquid in the planet’s center suggests other materials’ presence, which would lower the freezing point. This suggests that a totally solid core would be unlikely.
Mercury’s magnetic field offers valuable insight into the formation of the planet, the solar system, and even the universe. Magnetism on Mercury indicates that it has a liquid iron core, according to Messenger lead scientist Sean Solomon of Columbia University.

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