No shit? I wanna say I knew that. Infrared is cool. I got no beef with infrared. Gamma rays can suck my ass, though.
The Diversity of Life New deep-sea sighting: The barreleye fish has a transparent head and tubular eyes
“From nowhere we came; into nowhere we go. What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” ― Crowfoot Blackfoot Warrior Chief 1890
One step closer to colonizing Mars. On its dusty surface, an instrument the size of a lunchbox as been producing 6 g of oxygen per hour—about the output of a single tree. The MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, has been successfully making oxygen from the Red Planet's carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere since February 2021, when it touched down on the Martian surface as part of NASA's Perseverance rover mission. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/08/220831152733.htm
This reminds me of a quote expressed to define life that I read many years ago. I think it was Lynn Margulis. The idea is that life is like a series of waves, going into the earth and then coming out again, into and out of the earth, going below and then breaking the surface, in a constant rhythm of renewal.
Sounds similar to the big crunch, the expansion and contraction of the universe in a never ending cycle.
I thought the consensus now was that instead of a crunch the universe is likely to continue to expand and die a cold death.
Yeah that's right. But I hope they are wrong, or that there is a finite multiverse where universes die and are reborn constantly. I don't like the idea that everything will end forever.
Wait a few years and the consensus will be amended. Rate of expansion has like a 50% margin for error, I think, which actually isn't bad for cosmological estimation. I buy the new edition of Astronomy Today when it's released every 3-4 years, and nearly every edition switches from collapse to endless expansion. It's the go-to college textbook for basic astronomy and I highly recommend it if you have the $200 to spend. I wouldn't say it's for laypeople, but it's as layperson astronomy gets without requiring an advanced physics degree to comprehend.
I'll check that out. Is the back-and-forth about expansion to do with dark matter, and revised estimates as to whether there is enough dark matter to cause the crunch, or is it something else (or multiple factors)?
I believe so. I think it's a simple escape velocity equation, as in whether or not the universe is expanding fast enough to overcome the gravity of its own mass trying to hold it together. So if the mass of the universe (90% dark matter or whatever) is constantly being adjusted, that would track. IIRC the primoridial galaxies at the edge of the observable universe (quasars) are expanding at like a third of the speed of light, and are redshifted so far into long wave radio that anything further/older is no longer detectable. Of course, every year, scientists add another billion years to their estimated age of the universe. When I first got into astronomy, it was like 15 billion years old. Now it's around 24 or so. I don't want to say it's difficult to take seriously, but cosmology is sooooo stacked with theory atop theory, that any little twitch brings the whole model down.
@Homer Potvin Do like your replies. I agree with the simple escape velocity equation of the universe trying to out run its own mass. The gravitational constant. Once this fails then retraction happens. The age of the Universe I’ve always used 14bn years and now using the Lambda-CDM concordance model. The accelerated expansion or inflation part, made sense making square pegs fit into round holes. Why we see Galaxies older than the known Universe. My thought turned to time itself. Our comprehension of time was brought into existence with everything else at the same instance. The measure of c or speed of light becoming our ruler or rod for our own back to measure things. The inflation effect at the very start could be measured differently looking at time as a variable and not a constant? Even the speed of c... Dark Matter I’d always say as potential Dark Energy. This becomes a problem as we can’t detect any. Could in theory at the start of inflation could something like Dark Time or Dark c exist as a reflection? If not, then Dark Matter follows our laws but then dark energy surely exists? Sorry for the ramble, but loved the replies MartinM.
The long-term interspecies relationship between humans and dogs is a topic of intense scientific study. Now, researchers are using mythology to peer into the past. The prevalence of ancient myths identifying dogs as guides to the afterlife hint that our ancestors initially domesticated dogs not as hunting partners, but for spiritual and symbolic reasons. Archaeological finds—such as a 14,000 year old grave in Germany containing a couple and two dogs—fit this hypothesis. How mythology could help demystify dog domestication
Conjecture is great fun, even when one does it professionally and with great seriousness and much study. My theory is someone (or many someones) found orphaned wolf puppies, fell in love with the sociable little creatures, and kept them around for snuggling, three dog nights, hunting, protection, and cleaning up bits of cooked meat that fell on the cave floor.
Migration: the annual pull between summer grounds and overwintering locations. How much of it is instinctual? How much is learned? Two million wildebeest: a 1600 km round trip between the southern Serengeti and the Masai Mara in Kenya Monarch butterflies: a 10000 km round trip between north and south The record holders: Longest land migration: Caribou @ 6000 km round trip Longest air migration: Arctic tern @ 30000 km round trip Longest sea migration: Humpback whale @ 16000 km round trip
One of the best moments of my life came at the California end of the monarch migration. I stood at the edge of a eucalyptus grove to watch them and they started landing on me. Before long, I was wearing a living clock of butterflies opening and closing their wings.
Anyone who wants a good (fictional) book about the monarch butterfly and its migration should read Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver.
I still remember being about eight years old and sitting by the classroom window, watching this huge storm of little birds soar in the overcast skies. There were probably thousands of them, if not more. I don't think I saw that many of them after that.
The brain scans below show that the same parts of the brain are used when imagining future events as when recalling past events. Imagination depends on memory. It follows that the more we read, the more we learn, the greater our base of knowledge, the greater our imagination will be. Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration
