Wonders big and small
So it looks like there will be no announcement of "for history books" discovery on Mars. No organics, life, aliens or even twinkies. I'm not really disappointed because I didn't expect much. He said they need to confirm the results and they were probably unable to. Happens all the time in science. The mission just got started I'm sure it will find a lot of coll things before it's done.
Cool things like ice on Mercury. Real water ice on the planet so close to the Sun it orbits it in 88 days. The image of scorched small planet is so ingrained I sometimes forget how fast and how cold the parts Sun doesn't reach are and that there must be all the temperatures in between. Thank you Messenger for awesome news.
Even bigger news is the biggest black hole ever discovered. It's in the middle of a very small galaxy and it could shake the foundations of current models of galaxy evolution as its mass is much greater then they predict (17 billion times the mass of the Sun). It also takes much more it's galaxy mass then we've ever seen (14% of the total galaxy mass). Maybe Peter Hamilton was right and someone is powering their paradise.
On the opposite end of scale someone finally took a picture of the DNA. Till now we only new how it looks from secondhand sources (like X-ray crystallography) but now it's the electron microscopy time and the helix is clearly visible in all it's glory.
On even smaller scale there is a new transistor that controls the flow of atoms, rather than electrons creating superconductors out of superfluid atoms, flowing with no friction or physical resistance. So take some very cold superfluid and add some lasers and get you can have a transistor. Not very energy efficient but certainly very cool (like 500 nano-degrees above absolute zero).
And BTW do you remember the Niantic Project I mentioned last week? Well, players are having fun but the really cool thing might come out of all the data Google is able to get through this. Everything points to them using it to set up the Augmented Reality for Google glasses. Part of me feels like this is Google taking last bits of privacy and discovery and just mapping the rea into virtual like in some distopian novel and using us to do it with our own hands (and phones) but I don't even care because players enjoy it and I want AR. This is the future I was promised.
Cool things like ice on Mercury. Real water ice on the planet so close to the Sun it orbits it in 88 days. The image of scorched small planet is so ingrained I sometimes forget how fast and how cold the parts Sun doesn't reach are and that there must be all the temperatures in between. Thank you Messenger for awesome news.
Even bigger news is the biggest black hole ever discovered. It's in the middle of a very small galaxy and it could shake the foundations of current models of galaxy evolution as its mass is much greater then they predict (17 billion times the mass of the Sun). It also takes much more it's galaxy mass then we've ever seen (14% of the total galaxy mass). Maybe Peter Hamilton was right and someone is powering their paradise.
On the opposite end of scale someone finally took a picture of the DNA. Till now we only new how it looks from secondhand sources (like X-ray crystallography) but now it's the electron microscopy time and the helix is clearly visible in all it's glory.
On even smaller scale there is a new transistor that controls the flow of atoms, rather than electrons creating superconductors out of superfluid atoms, flowing with no friction or physical resistance. So take some very cold superfluid and add some lasers and get you can have a transistor. Not very energy efficient but certainly very cool (like 500 nano-degrees above absolute zero).
And BTW do you remember the Niantic Project I mentioned last week? Well, players are having fun but the really cool thing might come out of all the data Google is able to get through this. Everything points to them using it to set up the Augmented Reality for Google glasses. Part of me feels like this is Google taking last bits of privacy and discovery and just mapping the rea into virtual like in some distopian novel and using us to do it with our own hands (and phones) but I don't even care because players enjoy it and I want AR. This is the future I was promised.