Posts in the “science” category

Thanks to this Twitter post, and the image shown here from this NASA page, I now know what an analemma is.

These are some cool stats about neutron stars from this space.com article:

• Neutron stars are city-size stellar objects with a mass about 1.4 times that of the sun.
• They pack their mass inside a 12.4 mile diameter.
• They are so dense that a single teaspoon would weigh a billion tons — assuming you somehow managed to snag a sample without being captured by the body’s strong gravitational pull.
• On average, gravity on a neutron star is 2 billion times stronger than gravity on Earth.

From this tweet, this is a photo of Albert Einstein’s office on the day he passed away (April 18, 1955). Which reminds me of this Zen-like letter that Einstein wrote to the parents of a child who died.

“No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

~ Albert Einstein (software testing is like that too)

“Matter is frozen energy.”

~ Einstein

The Moon at 5:15 this morning, Monday, April 6, 2020. :)

Popular Science put together their list of the 100 greatest innovations of 2018.

xkcd has a really interesting article on orbital speed, i.e., how fast something needs to move (sideways) to stay in orbit over the Earth.

Over the 2019-2020 holidays, the Mars Curiosity Rover took a series of high-res photos on Mars. The panorama shown in the video in this tweet contains 1.8 billion pixels, and lets you zoom in on features many miles away.

And the Earth just keeps getting hotter ... the image comes from this tweet.

Back in 1912, a little newspaper article warned people about global warming. Per Snopes, the original story was written a year before this one.

If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it.

~ Richard Feynman

A ten-minute video where Richard Feynman discusses the Scientific Method. As always with Mr. Feynman, it’s smart, and funny:

Scientists are simply adults who retained and nurtured their native curiosity from childhood.

~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”

~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos (via @WorldAndScience)

This photo shows the size of our teeny weeny little Sun compared to a few other stars. From the excellent web page, "The Scala of the Universe 2".

A team of researchers have created this photograph showing the entanglement of photons. Business Insider has a nice little story about their work.

From NASA.gov: As if black holes weren't mysterious enough, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found an unexpected thin disk of material furiously whirling around a supermassive black hole at the heart of the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away.

The conundrum is that the disk shouldn't be there, based on current astronomical theories. However, the unexpected presence of a disk so close to a black hole offers a unique opportunity to test Albert Einstein's theories of relativity.

I’ve seen five rattlesnakes since I moved to Colorado, four dead and one that was quite upset with me. As I was walking yesterday I wondered, can snakes see? Here’s an answer from animals.howstuffworks.com.

LiveScience.com adds this information: “With the exception of a few species that have adapted to daytime hunting, most snakes do not see well. Generally they can see shapes but not details. Snakes called pit vipers can see well at night by an amazing trick. Their pits (one on each side of the head) sense heat (infrared light) like night vision goggles. These pits, not eyes, actually are thought to render images of prey in the snakes’ brains.”

I remember when the only wind turbines I had ever seen were the ones off of I-65 in Indiana, part of an experiment at Purdue. Now there are over 59,000 of them. I’m not sure why the southeast isn’t participating, but this U.S. wind turbine database is cool.