This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.
Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.
And just a FYI hydrogen alpha (Ha) sulphur II and oxygen III all emit light in the visible spectrum so technically it is not false color just enhanced color. [Reply]
Here's a good explanation of how and why they enhance space pictures. It includes some neat interactive features that let you see some space pictures in different wavelengths and through different wavelength filters. Pretty cool:
Originally Posted by Discuss Thrower:
By that logic we're inferior to dogs because we can't see UV spectrum, right?
Rack city, TRICK.
Look maaaaaaan... The pictures are awesome, enhanced or not! They look cool, they get our minds wondering, and that's good for science and kids getting into science. And like all awesome pics, chances are they're touched-up in some way. From Playboy to Penthouse, to NASA, you don't want the complete naked truth (it has zits and shit, and needs implants prolly!!). Put an alien craft in there somewhere and I'll stare at it even longer!
So let them PhotoShop the horse-head nebula to enhance the gasses and dust, it amazes my simple mind! [Reply]
Originally Posted by Dave Lane:
Our eyes suck, extremely poor design. Be cool if we could see UV IR and the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.
Considering nothing else has arisen on this planet to challenge our domination of it I'd say we're doing pretty damned good. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Fish:
Here's a good explanation of how and why they enhance space pictures. It includes some neat interactive features that let you see some space pictures in different wavelengths and through different wavelength filters. Pretty cool:
Originally Posted by Dave Lane:
And just a FYI hydrogen alpha (Ha) sulphur II and oxygen III all emit light in the visible spectrum so technically it is not false color just enhanced color.
Originally Posted by Fish:
Here's a good explanation of how and why they enhance space pictures. It includes some neat interactive features that let you see some space pictures in different wavelengths and through different wavelength filters. Pretty cool:
Originally Posted by GloryDayz:
Look maaaaaaan... The pictures are awesome, enhanced or not! They look cool, they get our minds wondering, and that's good for science and kids getting into science. And like all awesome pics, chances are they're touched-up in some way. From Playboy to Penthouse, to NASA, you don't want the complete naked truth (it has zits and shit, and needs implants prolly!!). Put an alien craft in there somewhere and I'll stare at it even longer!
So let them PhotoShop the horse-head nebula to enhance the gasses and dust, it amazes my simple mind!
GloryDayz really hits upon why the pictures are enhanced: People want to go "Oooo, aaaah." when they see the pictures. Astronomers are no dummies. Their funding comes from tax dollars. If all they are gonna do is hand out black and white 1950s era type photos, the taxpaying public is gonna pull the plug on their pet project. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Dave Lane:
Our eyes suck, extremely poor design. Be cool if we could see UV IR and the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.
Give it time.
Google glass is just now getting run through the mixer... [Reply]
Originally Posted by Fat Elvis:
GloryDayz really hits upon why the pictures are enhanced: People want to go "Oooo, aaaah." when they see the pictures. Astronomers are no dummies. Their funding comes from tax dollars. If all they are gonna do is hand out black and white 1950s era type photos, the taxpaying public is gonna pull the plug on their pet project.
Good thought but no it's actually competition from all the other Astro photographers who are out there and you want your pictures look better than theirs, that's the real motivation. [Reply]
August 20, 2013, marks Earth Overshoot day— the estimated date when the people on Earth have used up the planet's annual supply of renewable natural resources and reached its carbon-absorbing capacity. After that point, people are using more than the planet can sustain. It's a one-day reminder of a year-round problem — humans are living too large on a finite planet.
You probably have a general sense of why. The human population continues to grow. People are consuming more and more resources. And we still have only one planet. To appreciate just how large we are living in relation to our finite planet , let's look more closely at some numbers.
According to the Global Footprint Network, Earth Overshoot day became an issue around 1975. That's when humanity's ecological footprint first exceeded the biocapacity of the planet.
Before that, people's ecological footprint — measured as the area required to supply the food, fish, fiber and energy we consume every year — was within what the planet could sustain. In 1975, there were about 4.1 billion people. Today there are more than 7.3 billion. As the cumulative footprint of the population grows, Earth Overshoot Day moves two to three days earlier each year.
To get a feeling for what humanity's global footprint looks like, consider the land people use to feed themselves. People presently use 38 percent of the planet to grow crops and raise livestock (check out Navin Ramankutty's animation of global cropland for a "wow" visualization). Many of the agricultural lands are in places that were once temperate grasslands. So much habitat has been turned under by the plow that temperate grasslands are the most imperiled and least protected habitat types on the planet. Future frontiers of agricultural expansion will most likely be in the tropics as people clear high-biodiversity tropical forests to raise cattle, grow soy and install palm oil plantations.
By 2050, the human population is projected to be about 9 billion people. Over that same time, demand for food, water and energy are expected to double. If you think about today's consumption rate per billion people as a shopping cart, people are filling 7 shopping carts. Earth Overshoot Day is a reminder that such a high level of demand is already putting a huge ecological strain on our one planet. By 2050, 9 billion people will be filling twice as many carts per billion — for a total of 18 shopping carts. That's a 150-percent increase in demand!
How can society start to bend the trend to put the planet on a sustainable trajectory?
A first step is to change the mentality about how people grow food and use other natural resources like forests, water and energy resources. Instead of taking more to make more, people need to commit to making more with less. Society also needs to become passionate about efficiency — more crops per drop of water, more miles per gallon of fuel. It's a challenge that should inspire innovation and ingenuity about how people produce and use precious and finite natural resources.
Here is just one of many examples emerging around the world. The Better Cotton Initiative (a partnership that included WWF) worked with cotton farmers to improve management practices on their farms. Over five years, from 2005 to 2010, the results were dramatic — pesticide use was reduced by 60 percent, water use was reduced by 40 percent, synthetic fertilizer use was reduced by 30 percent, and the associated cost savings meant those farmers' incomes increased 15 percent to 20 percent. That's great for farmers, and for the planet, because cotton accounts for 24 percent of the world's insecticide market and 11 percent of global pesticide sales, and 73 percent of the world's cotton crop grows on irrigated land. [Reply]
Chronostasis. The fascinating phenomenon where your brain seems to briefly perceive time as freezing or even going backwards... for... some reason.....
Human eyes have constant breaks in perception whenever they flit about, in blind jumps called saccades. To experience this temporary blindness, look at your own eyes in a mirror and shift your sight focus from one eye to the next. Although a person standing next to you and watching you will effortlessly see your eyes flit and shift from one direction (line of sight) to another, you will never be able to see your own eyes move - even though they do move and are indeed seen as such by the other person. This blindness is due to the saccades.
Almost everyone has had the slightly odd experience of looking at their watch, and believing that the watch had stopped. Then, after a perceptibly longer time than a second , the seconds hand of the watch (or its digital display) starts moving again and all subsequent measured seconds last for, well, a second.
This well known effect happens because the brain fills backwards in time the period of time when it was blind with more of the same, to wit, with the image it saw first when the cascade ceased. So far, so good, although we can wonder at how the brain can fill time backwards in our perception. But at least this is an explanation that only involves our brain and our perceptive skills.
And then this explanation breaks down, because of something called the dead phone illusion. It's a like effect that can happen when picking up a telephone handset with an intermittent dial tone (pause/tone/pause/tone …): The first pause seems longer than the subsequent ones, and the explanation by saccadic eye movement does not apply.
Yarrow et al. have investigated further reproducible kindred cases, such as when tactile perception actually precedes the time of actual physical contact, and so on.
An ultimate explanation for chronostasis - when time stands still - is still elusive. [Reply]
Remember the movie Red Planet? Yeah... Science has pretty much made one of those killer robots now....
RoboSimian is an ape-like robot designed to meet the disaster-recovery tasks of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
This video shows RoboSimian and its unique hands under construction at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, as well as simulations of the finished robot.
The RoboSimian team is led by JPL. Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, collaborated on the development of the robot’s unique hands.
