Random Fact
Gastric acid is a digestive fluid formed in your stomach with a pH of 1.3 to 3.5 and is composed of hydrochloric acid. Gastic acid is so acidic iron nails will be dissolved in your stomach.
Warning: Do not eat iron nails, you will puncture your stomach and end up digesting yourself. Which is bad, very bad.
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Our planet orbits nicely around a star, being bathed in its light, but a new study finds that there could be a vast number of “sunless” planets wondering the Milky Way
Imagine a planet where the night sky is all you have, any time, anywhere you go – where the phrase “day job” has no meaning.
The Milky Way may hold a vast number of such sunless planets – perhaps up to 100,000 times more than all the stars in the galaxy, according to a new estimate from researchers in the United States and Britain.
Since 1995, when hunting for planets outside the solar system grew from a fringe field to mainstream astronomy, researchers have uncovered as many as 760 extrasolar planets orbiting other stars – as the Earth orbits the sun – with more than 2,000 additional candidates awaiting confirmation.
The vast majority of these are planets in the classical sense – meaning they orbit host stars, although often arrayed in unusual patterns compared with Earth’s home system.
Since 2000, however, astronomers have discovered planets with no obvious stellar home. A group of Spanish astronomers reported that year discovering planets ranging from five to 15 times Jupiter’s mass free floating in a cluster of young stars in the constellation Orion. Last year, two groups of astronomers jointly announced the discovery of 10 Jupiter-class planets, the vast majority free of the grip of any host star. The results appeared last May in the journal Nature.
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Source: alaskadispatch.com
Celestial Line Up
Jupiter, Venus and the moon will line up in an impressive triple play this weekend, and skywatchers won’t even have to venture outside to see it.
The three celestial bodies will be in close proximity to each other on the nights of Saturday and Sunday (Feb. 25 and 26), forming a skywatching treat known as a triple conjunction. The online Slooh Space Camera will webcast the action live, beginning at 9:30 p.m. EST both Saturday and Sunday (0230 GMT on Feb. 26 and 27).
Slooh will provide footage from multiple observatories around the world, including Arizona and the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The broadcast can be accessed at Slooh’s homepage, found here
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Source: space.com
Simulated Mars trip planned to find best meals on the red planet. It’s almost like a picnic!
Life may exist in some form on Mars. Well-stocked supermarkets don’t.
So if astronauts someday head there in what’s estimated would be a three-year mission — roughly six months travel each way, plus two years on the planet — what they’d take to eat would be among the concerns.
To figure the cheapest and easiest ways to give astronauts well-rounded meals that they wouldn’t eventually tire of, a group of Cornell University andUniversity of Hawaii-Manoa researchers are looking for a half-dozen volunteers to spend four months next year living in a simulated Mars base on a Hawaii lava flow.
The volunteers will live essentially like astronauts, Hunter says. They’ll dress in simulated spacesuits — hazardous material suits instead of heavier and more cumbersome spacesuits. They’ll take a mix of the prepared foods NASA astronauts eat today and some shelf-stable foods, such as flour, sugar and freeze-dried meats, for making their own meals.
NASA currently has no plans for a Mars mission, though it’s developing a rocket for deep-space distances, such as the moon or Mars, spokesman J.D. Harrington says. It also has a research projects underway that look at other issues related to long spaceflights, such as radiation exposure and eyesight problems astronauts often develop, he says.
The site of the study hasn’t been determined, though there are a number of locations in Hawaii that are “quite Mars-like in various ways,” says Kim Binstead, co-investigator at the University of Hawaii-NASA Astrobiology Institute. “We need a site that is very low on vegetation, visually isolated, visually Mars-like and very stark.”
Volunteers, Hunter says, should be mostly scientists or engineers and “people who are congenial or easygoing, without a whole lot of prickles — people who are interested in food, who know how to cook. And people who are healthy.”
Those chosen will go to Cornell this summer to train to prepare meals with the given supplies, Hunter says. There’ll be a two-week dry run before the four-month experiment “to make sure everyone gets along and the equipment works,” she says.
The deadline for applying is Feb. 29. To apply, go to manoa.hawaii.edu/hi-seas. Researchers say they’ll make their choices by the end of May.
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Source: USA Today
Random Fact (Dr Who edition)
The average adult requires 2500 kilocalories (food calories) per day. Assume half is required as a kid from ages 0-15 and that the average human lives 75 years. This equates to 61.6 million kilocalories or 2.6 x 1011 Joules of energy. The average human consumes more energy than the total energy released in the nuclear fission of one gram of uranium-235 (8.8×1010 J). So watch out for those angels, your potential energy is worth quite a bit.
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Spitzer spots first solid buckyballs in stellar disc
Stacks the size of 10,000 Everests found
The first solid “buckyball” Carbon-60 molecules have been spotted forming a ring around a star 6,500 light-years away, according to data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
A new paper reports a pair of stars called “XX Ophiuchi,” with what looks like a disc of the molecules - dubbed Buckminsterfullerene after the architect who used a similar geodesic style - in orbit around one of the stars. In total they have a mass equivalent to 10,000 Everests, but in practice form a thin ring in orbit around a B-class subdwarf star in the system.
“These buckyballs are stacked together to form a solid, like oranges in a crate,” said Nye Evans of Keele University in England, lead author of the paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in a statement. “The particles we detected are miniscule, far smaller than the width of a hair, but each one would contain stacks of millions of buckyballs.”
Spritzer caught the first glimpse of gaseous Carbon-60 in 2010, but this first sighting of the formations as solids, suggesting that they may be more common than first thought. While Buckminsterfullerene occurs naturally in some forms of soot and minerals, it’s only in the last 20 years that humans have been able to synthesize it in appreciable quantities of the pure form.
“This exciting result suggests that buckyballs are even more widespread in space than the earlier Spitzer results showed,” said Mike Werner, project scientist for Spitzer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “They may be an important form of carbon, an essential building block for life, throughout the cosmos.”
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Source: theregister.co.uk
Men may not become extinct after all, according to a new study. Well that’s good to know.
Previous research has suggested the Y sex chromosome, which only men carry, is decaying genetically so fast that it will be extinct in five million years’ time.
A gene within the chromosome is the switch which leads to testes development and the secretion of male hormones.
But a new US study in Nature suggests the genetic decay has all but ended.
Professor Jennifer Graves of Australian National University has previously suggested the Y chromosome may become extinct in as little as five million years’ time, based on the rate at which genes are disappearing from the chromosome.
Genetics professor Brian Sykes predicted the demise of the Y chromosome, and of men, in as little as 100,000 years in his 2003 book Adam’s Curse: A Future without Men.
The predictions were based on comparisons between the human X and Y sex chromosomes. While these chromosomes were once thought to be identical far back in the early history of mammals, the Y chromosome now has about 78 genes, compared with about 800 in the X chromosome.
They have now sequenced the Y chromosome of the rhesus monkey, which is separated from humans by 25 million years of evolution.
The conclusion from these comparative studies is that genetic decay has in recent history been minimal, with the human chromosome having lost no further genes in the last six million years, and only one in the last 25 million years.
“The Y is not going anywhere and gene loss has probably come to a halt,” Ms Hughes told BBC News. “We can’t rule out the possibility it could happen another time, but the genes which are left on the Y are here to stay.
“They apparently serve some critical function which we don’t know much about yet, but the genes are being preserved pretty well by natural selection.”
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Source: BBC
Glitches in Faster than light neutrinos calculations
Months after researchers reported that they measured neutrinos traveling faster than light, they’re finding that the incredible result may have been due to a bad connection rather than a violation of Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
The potential instrumental glitches, first reported today by ScienceInsider’s Edwin Cartlidge, is due to be addressed on Thursday in a statement from the OPERA Collaboration, the group behind the controversial neutrino-beam experiments.
Last year, the OPERA team made ultra-precise measurements of how long it took for neutrinos to make the 450-mile (732-kilometer) trip between the CERN particle physics lab on the French-Swiss border and Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory. When they took the speed of light and a wide variety of other experimental factors into consideration, they determined that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds before they should have.
Now sources familiar with the OPERA review say scientists have identified two potential problems with the experimental apparatus. One has to do with a fiber-optic connector that sends a GPS time stamp to the experiment’s master clock. That connector may not have been functioning correctly when the neutrino-timing measurements were made, and as a result, the recorded flight time would be shorter than the actual time. That alone could explain the seemingly faster-than-light results.
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Source: MSN
Random Fact
The human brain doesn’t finish developing till your early twenties. The part of your brain that hasn’t finished developing is the prefrontal cortex and coincidentally it’s the part of the human brain that classifies us as, well, human. It’s also the decision making engine of our brain (why teenagers make terrible decisions most of the time). So if you’re a teen and screw up? No worries, tell them your prefrontal cortex hasn’t fully developed!
P.S. Don’t really do that
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Fruit flies get drunk to save their lives
Fruit flie larvae feed on the yeast and other fungi from rotting, or fermenting, fruit; during their snacking, the flies are bound to ingest the boozy byproducts of the fungi’s fermentation — they are even able to use it as a food source and thrive on food with up to 4 percent alcohol.
Higher alcohol levels can be toxic to the fruit flies, study researcher Todd Schlenke, an assistant professor at Emory University, told LiveScience. “If the alcohol level gets too high, they can’t break it down fast enough.” The flies in the study reached only about 0.02 percent blood alcohol levels; they would have to drink four times that to reach the blood alcohol level considered illegal for driving.
This idyllic existence on a booze-soaked piece of fruit is often disrupted by parasites, including wasps that lay their larvae in the larva of the fruit fly. If untreated, the tiny wasps eat the flies from the inside out, bursting from the flies’ bloodstream fully formed. The researchers have discovered, though, that the flies use their naturally high tolerance to alcohol to kill off their blood bugs.
In the study, when the wasps tried to lay their eggs in fly larvae on food containing 6 percent alcohol, they were less likely to lay eggs, “presumably because they are feeling bad,” Schlenke said. The eggs they did lay were less likely to survive.
“If you dissect open a fly that was fed alcohol food, the wasps were obviously dead and in a lot of cases the internal organs in the wasp larvae had fallen out the wasp’s anus,” Schlenke said. “They were turned inside out.” Now that’s a bad hangover.
When infected larvae are placed in a dish with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic food, they even make a break for the alcohol to reduce their parasite load: After 24 hours, 80 percent of the infected fly larvae were hanging out on the alcohol side of the dish, but only 30 percent of the uninfected larvae were.
“We gave them a choice between food with alcohol and food without alcohol, and the infected flies overwhelmingly went to consume the toxic alcohol food,” Schlenke said. It’s as if the flies ask themselves, “Do I want to suffer from toxic levels of alcohol or do I want to die from this wasp?”
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Source: MSNBC
I'll be turning 18 soon and am a aspiring physicist. I'm working on a double major at the moment in physics and aerospace engineering and a life goal of mine is to help construct the next line of deep space vehicles.
