We’re NEVER gonna hear the end of it now! wink
The likely-dwarf planet adds to the mounting evidence of a dark super Earth at the outer boundary of our solar system.
One of the weirdest aspects of quantum mechanics is entanglement, because two entangled particles affecting each other across vast distances seems to violate a fundamental principle of physics called locality: things that happen at a particular point in space can only influence the points closest to it. But what if locality — and space itself — is not so fundamental after all? Author George Musser explores the implications in his new book, Spooky Action At a Distance.
When the philosopher Jenann Ismael was ten years old, her father, an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Calgary, bought a big wooden cabinet at an auction. Rummaging through it, she came across an old kaleidoscope, and she was entranced. For hours she experimented with it and figured out how it worked. “I didn’t tell my sister when I found it, because I was scared she’d want it,” she recalls.
As you peer into a kaleidoscope and turn the tube, multicolored shapes begin to blossom, spin and merge, shifting unpredictably in seeming defiance of rational explanation, almost as if they were exerting spooky action at a distance on one another. But the more you marvel at them, the more regularity you notice in their motion. Shapes on opposite sides of your visual field change in unison, and their symmetry clues you in to what’s really going on: those shapes aren’t physical objects, but images of objects — of shards of glass that are jiggling around inside a mirrored tube.
Going up? Attention space elevator button pushers!
A feature-length documentary called “Sky Line” is being released this month, an impressive view that follows a group of scientists and entrepreneurs as egos collide in an attempt to reach for the stars.
The film, which centers on the real-life building of the once fantastical space elevator concept, will debut at DOC NYC 2015 – America’s largest documentary festival — and will be released on all major On Demand platforms on November 20th, 2015.
The inky black of the outer solar system just got a little brighter. A speck of light spotted in October 2015 is a rocky world more than 3 times more distant than Pluto – the farthest body in our solar system ever seen.
“We don’t know anything about its orbit,” says Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, whose team discovered the new addition. “We just know it’s the most distant object known.”
Sheppard announced the new object, called V774104, on 10 November at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences, held in National Harbor, Maryland.
Interested in being an astronaut? NASA now hiring.
Have you ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut? Well, this could be your chance.
NASA revealed on Wednesday that it will begin accepting applications for the next class of astronaut candidates starting on Dec. 14.
Continue reading “NASA is now hiring astronauts to head up Mars mission” »
Satellites are shrinking, and so is the cost to build them and shoot them up into orbit.
Cubesats, which weigh 1.33 kilograms or less, have become popular for researchers with grants and federal agencies like NASA. But their price, while lower than clunky old-school satellites, has remained out of reach for those who can’t pay a mortgage’s worth of money and don’t know how to hitch a ride on a rocket. Enter picosats and femtosats, Cubesats’s smaller, cheaper siblings—and the companies that will help you send them to space.
While Mars doesn’t have much in the way of Earth-like weather, it does evidently share one kind of weird meteorology: acid fog.
Apparently NASA state that there’s a 12% chance of the Earth being hit by an extreme solar storm within the next ten years.
VIDEO: The last major solar storm left the entire province of Quebec in a blackout.
For the first time, physicists in the US have managed to measure the force that attracts antimatter particles to each other. And, surprisingly, it’s not that different to the attractive force that holds regular matter together.
The results take us one step closer to understanding one of the biggest mysteries of our Universe: why there’s so much more matter than antimatter, and suggest that the imbalance isn’t a result of antiparticles not being able to ‘stick’ together.
For every particle that exists – electrons, protons, quarks – there’s an equal and opposite antiparticle, which has the opposite electrical charge and spin, and these antiparticles make up what’s known as antimatter. When the Universe was formed, physicists believe that equal amounts of antimatter and matter were produced, but today it’s very hard to find any naturally occurring antimatter left.
400 DAYS is a psychological sci-fi film centering on four astronauts who are sent on a simulated mission to a distant planet to test the psychological effects of deep space travel. Locked away for 400 days, the crew’s mental state begins to deteriorate when they lose all communication with the outside world. Forced to exit the ship, they discover that this mission may not have been a simulation after all.
