Name: Norman Anthony Aguero
Currently a student at FIU. My major is chemistry and my minor is physics. My goal is to hopefully earn a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.
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The Tower
Another picture created by the Hungarian artist István Orosz. The tower is like a Möbius Strip, also called the twisted cylinder, which in this case has become a fascinating illusion of people within a tower made of stones.
The work of István Orosz is reproduced here with his permission. More examples of his work can be found at his web site, and also at the Gallery Diabolus.
Julian Beever is an artist who has spent 10 years creating pavement art in Europe, USA and Australia. Many of his creations are optical illusions, such as this one, where Julian appears to be perched on a ledge, waiting for Batman and Robin to climb the building and rescue him.
In reality, there is just pavement in front of him, and the street below together with the expectant crowd, plus the blazing building below him, are all tricks played on the eye (a modern example of trompe l'oeil - a French term that means literally 'trick the eye').
Here is another of Julian Beever's amazing creations. This is a true anamorphic picture.
From one position - where the picture above has been taken from - everything looks normal. Except that the pool isn't really there, of course - Julian's foot is touching the pavement, not the water! However anamorphic pictures are stretched, so that while they look fine from one particular viewpoint, they look quite strange and often unrecognisable from any other viewpoint.
The Amazing Dots
Watch the X in the middle very closely. You should start to see a green dot that rotates around the circle - this green dot is an not the illusion; then you should see the purple dots disappear.... but they haven't really gone. It is an after image effect, sometimes called a 'negative retinal afterimage' - move your head slightly, and the dots will reappear... amazing or what?
This illusion was designed by Jeremy L Hinton of Bristol, UK, and this illusion - with a lot more explanation and many other illusions as well - can be found at the web site of Michael Bach.
Cocoon of a New White Dwarf
Like a butterfly, a white dwarf star begins its life by casting off the cocoon that enclosed it.
In the cocoon-like structure above, the planetary nebula designated NGC 2440, contains one of the hottest white dwarfs known to scientists. The white dwarf can be seen as the bright dot near the photo's center. Our sun eventually will become a "white dwarf butterfly," but not for another 5 billion years.
Image credit: NASA/R. Ciardullo (PSU)/H. Bond (STScI)
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Dazzling Dunes
As NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity creeps farther into "Endurance Crater," the dune field on the crater floor appears even more dramatic. This image taken by the rover's panoramic camera shows that the dune crests have accumulated more dust than the flanks of the dunes and the flat surfaces between them. Also evident is a "blue" tint on the flat surfaces as compared to the dune flanks. This results from the presence of the hematite-containing spherules, or "blueberries", that accumulate on the flat surfaces.
Sinuous tendrils of sand less than 1 meter (3.3 feet) high extend from the main dune field toward the rover. Scientists hope to send the rover down to one of these tendrils in an effort to learn more about the characteristics of the dunes. Dunes are a common feature across the surface of Mars, and knowledge gleaned from investigating the Endurance dunes may apply to similar dunes elsewhere.
Before the rover heads down to the dunes, rover drivers must first establish whether the slippery slope that leads to them is firm enough to ensure a successful drive back out of the crater. Otherwise, such hazards might make the dune field a true sand trap.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell
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February 15, 2007 -- 11:15 PM EST // link)
It's times like these you've just got to miss that dear lady Molly Ivins.
Meet our new friend, Georgia State House Rep. Ben Bridges (R), chairman of the retirement committee in the state house.
Bridges is now in a bit of trouble for spilling the beans about evolution being the product of a Pharisee Jew conspiracy to bamboozle normal Americans and destroy Christianity.
“Indisputable evidence — long hidden but now available to everyone — demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” reads the letter that went out under Bridges' name. “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”
It seems that the actual author or analyst, I guess you might say, was a fellow named Marshall Hall, the husband of Bridges campaign manager, Bonnie Hall. Then they sent it out over Bridges' signature to state legislators in Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio. And they didn't stop by letting the cat out of the bag on evolution. They also blew the whistle on all this hokum about the earth revolving around the Sun.
Barnes' memo pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They've even caught on to the "centuries-old conspiracy" on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.
Now, it was down in Texas that things started to spin out of control. Warren Chisum (R), House Appropriations Committee Chairman in the Texas state House, took the memo from his friend Bridges and used the House operations system to distribute the memo throughout the legislature. (Here's Chisum's cover letter and the Bridges' memo.)
The ADL caught wind of the Bridges memo and now Chisum says he's "willing to apologize if I've offended anyone" if anyone got their big nose bent out of shape.
Reports the Dallas Morning News: "Mr. Chisum said he hadn't looked at the Web site and didn't realize that he was distributing that type of material. He expressed chagrin that he didn't vet the material more carefully."
Indeed, even Bridges is now saying that he didn't have anything to do with the memo.
Hall doesn't agree. He said he wrote it and got Bridges' approval to send it out. "I gave him a copy of it months ago,” Hall, who is a retired high school teacher told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “I had already written this up as an idea to present to him so he could see what it was and what we were thinking.” And of course the two have teamed up to ban the teaching of evolution in Georgia back in 2005. So, Bridges' denials are ringing a tad hollow.
And the views expressed in his memo are just too compelling for Bridges to deny outright.
Asked if he agreed with the Kaballah evolution conspiracy theory and the earth's lack of motion, he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory. I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?”
(ed.note: Additional research provided by Eric Kleefeld.)
Star Crossed
How massive can a star be? Estimates made from distance, brightness and standard solar models have accorded one star in the open cluster Pismis 24 over 200 times the mass of our sun. This star is the brightest object located just to the right of the gas front in the above image.
Close inspection of images taken recently with the Hubble Space Telescope, however, have shown that Pismis 24-1 derives its brilliant luminosity not from a single star but from three at least. Component stars would still remain near 100 solar masses, making them among the more massive stars currently on record. Toward the image left, stars are still forming in the associated emission nebula NGC 6357, including several that appear to be breaking out and illuminating a spectacular cocoon.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and J. M. Apellániz (IAA, Spain)
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April 6, 1999: The ion propulsion system on Deep Space 1 is the culmination of over 50 years of development on electric engine systems in space. Launched on Oct. 24, 1998, Deep Space 1 will be the first spacecraft to actually use ion propulsion to reach another planetary body.
The engineering that makes this possible represents a journey that started more than half a century ago, when modern rocketry was invented. Looking back, Ernst Stuhlinger, a world expert on electric propulsion, said that the technology "owed its life-giving spark to Wernher von Braun."
Dr. Wernher von Braun, a rocket scientist from Germany, was first introduced to the possibility of electric propulsion in the 1930s, through his mentor, Dr. Hermann Oberth. But von Braun started his career working on chemical propulsion systems.
The principle behind the Deep Space 1 engine is much the same as what you experience when you pull hot socks out of the clothes dryer on a cold winter day. The socks push away from each other because they are electrostatically charged, and like charges repel. The challenge in electric space propulsion is to charge a fluid so its atoms can be expelled in one direction, and thus propel the spacecraft in the other direction.
Left: An engineer at NASA's Lewis Research Center prepares to test the DS1 ion engine.
The fuel used by Deep Space 1's ion engine is xenon, a gas that is more than 4 times heavier than air. When the ion engine is running, electrons are emitted from a hollow tube called a cathode. These electrons enter a magnet-ringed chamber, where they strike the xenon atoms. The impact of an electron on a xenon atom knocks away one of xenon's 54 electrons. This results in a xenon atom with a positive charge, or what is known as an ion.
At the rear of the chamber, a pair of metal grids is charged positively and negatively, respectively, with up to 1,280 volts of electricity. The force of this electric charge exerts a strong electrostatic pull on the xenon ions. The xenon ions shoot out the back of the engine at a speed of 100,000 km/h (60,000 mph). At full throttle, the ion engine will consume 2,500 watts of electrical power, and put out 1/50th of a pound of thrust. That's far less than the thrust of even small chemical rockets. But an ion engine can run for months or even years, and it's up to 10 times more efficient.
"The small thrust (from the electric propulsion system) is effective for missions to the more distant parts of the solar system," von Braun wrote in the 1950s.
We can now reach the close stars, such as Proxima Centauri, within 60 years. Half a decade or so ago, the trip would of taken ~ 14,000 years to get there. We are on the verge of starflight.
Considering that we have wrecked our own biosphere, survival of life on our planet will project us into other solar systems. Maybe Newton"s third law applies to mechanics, as well as, biological survival.
Cleveland Volcano, Aleutian Islands
At 3:00 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time on May 23, 2006, Flight Engineer Jeff Williams from International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 13 contacted the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) to report that the Cleveland Volcano had produced a plume of ash. Shortly after the activity began, he took this photograph. This picture shows the ash plume moving west-southwest from the volcano’s summit. A bank of fog (upper right) is a common feature around the Aleutian Islands. The event proved to be short-lived; two hours later, the plume had completely detached from the volcano. The AVO reported that the ash cloud height could have been as high as 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) above sea level.
Cleveland Volcano, situated on the western half of Chuginadak Island, is one of the most active of the volcanoes in the Aleutian Islands, which extend west-southwest from the Alaska mainland. It is a stratovolcano, composed of alternating layers of hardened lava, compacted volcanic ash, and volcanic rocks.
Image credit: NASA
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Planets and Stars To Scale
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia over Texas on February 1, 2003 during reentry into the Earth's atmosphere on its 28th mission, STS-107. All seven crewmembers were killed.
Although this video is almost 10 minutes long, I think It's well worth watching.
Saturn's Hyperion: A Moon With Odd Craters
What lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange craters? No one knows. To help find out, Cassini took this image, containing unprecedented detail, as the spacecraft swept past the sponge-textured moon in late 2005.
The image shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and odd surfaces. At the bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark material. Inspection of the image shows bright features indicating that the dark material might be only tens of meters thick in some places. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it might house a vast system of caverns inside.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, JPL, SSI and Cassini Imaging Team
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