THANK YOU SIR,REALLY.
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My dog. A very happy dog indeed!
© Antonis Achilleos
Double Cheeseburgers with Caramelized Onions Recipe
Contributed by Ron Boyd
Really Surprisingly good chicken….
One of those nice surprises…. made what could have been a very pedestrian chicken dish into, well, something really good……
I had three frozen chicken fillets which needed slowly sauteeing in garlic and onions with a small amount of stock. I gradually turned up the heat and added more stock.
Mushrooms went in on top then some tom paste….. finished with some chopped tomatoes and reduced. I didnt even deglaze with wine and it was superb.
PeteUplink's Universe: An ALMA Antenna on the Move
This photograph shows one of the 12-metre-diameter European antennas of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) being moved at the project’s Operations Support Facility. Since this photograph was taken, this antenna, and others like it, have been…
L’Espiguette #2
Saccharin, an artifical sweetener first produced in 1878, viewed with polarized light microscopy.
Image by Loes Modderman.
Id have a t-shirt with this on…. sweet.
Hidden Portals in Earth’s Magnetic Field |
A favorite theme of science fiction is “the portal” — an extraordinary opening in space or time that connects travelers to distant realms. A good portal is a shortcut, a guide, a door into the unknown. If only they actually existed….
It turns out that they do, sort of, and a NASA-funded researcher at the University of Iowa has figured out how to find them.
“We call them X-points or electron diffusion regions,” explains plasma physicist Jack Scudder of the University of Iowa. “They’re places where the magnetic field of Earth connects to the magnetic field of the Sun, creating an uninterrupted path leading from our own planet to the sun’s atmosphere 93 million miles away.”
Observations by NASA’s THEMIS spacecraft and Europe’s Cluster probes suggest that these magnetic portals open and close dozens of times each day. They’re typically located a few tens of thousands of kilometers from Earth where the geomagnetic field meets the onrushing solar wind. Most portals are small and short-lived; others are yawning, vast, and sustained. Tons of energetic particles can flow through the openings, heating Earth’s upper atmosphere, sparking geomagnetic storms, and igniting bright polar auroras.
NASA is planning a mission called “MMS,” short for Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, due to launch in 2014, to study the phenomenon. Bristling with energetic particle detectors and magnetic sensors, the four spacecraft of MMS will spread out in Earth’s magnetosphere and surround the portals to observe how they work.
Just one problem: Finding them. Magnetic portals are invisible, unstable, and elusive. They open and close without warning “and there are no signposts to guide us in,” notes Scudder.
Actually, there are signposts, and Scudder has found them.
Portals form via the process of magnetic reconnection. Mingling lines of magnetic force from the sun and Earth criss-cross and join to create the openings. “X-points” are where the criss-cross takes place. The sudden joining of magnetic fields can propel jets of charged particles from the X-point, creating an “electron diffusion region.”
To learn how to pinpoint these events, Scudder looked at data from a space probe that orbited Earth more than 10 years ago. continue reading + video
That looks bloody good.
PeteUplink's Universe: Something rich and strange – Hubble eyes NGC 5972
We just got the processed Hubble images for NGC 5972. This is a galaxy with active nucleus, large double radio source, and the most extensive ionized gas we turned up in the Voorwerpje project. We knew from ground-based data that the gas is so extensive that some would fall outside the Hubble…
Zooming in on HE 0109 3518 (by ESOobservatory)
This image begins with a photograph of the area around the constellation of Sculptor. It then zooms in through a Digitized Sky Survey 2 image to VLT observations of HE 0108-3518, a bright quasar which is illuminating the gas in surrounding dark galaxies. These galaxies are essentially devoid of stars and would not be visible at all without the light coming from the quasar.
Credit:
ESO, Digitized Sky Survey 2, Akira Fujii/David Malin Images. Music: Disasterpeace
How to Store a Bit of Data on a Single Molecule
Posted by Adam_Clark_Estes on Wednesday, Jul 11, 2012
It’s not news that technology is getting smaller, faster, but once things start happening on a molecular level, it starts to get kind of ridiculous. Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology just published breakthrough research in Nature explaining how they were able to read and write a bit of information on a single molecule. The principle behind the process is relatively simple. The researchers embedded a single magnetic iron atom in an organic molecule made up of 51 other atoms that act as a shell to protect the information inside. Applying a stream of electricity to the new molecule changes the state of that iron atom, effectively storing a bit of data.
The relatively simple process could lead to huge leaps in information storage technology. If you consider that your typical magnetic drive needs 3 million atoms for a bit of data, these molecular bits could store 60,000 times as much information in the same space. Now we’re not talking about gigabytes of storage in your typical hard drive but rather hundreds of petabytes. A single petabyte amounts to one billion gigabytes or enough space to store 13.3 years of HD video.
Of course, there are complications. This technology would likely be put to use in solid state hard drives, but the circuitry alone would take up far more space than the molecular storage units. You’d need one wire to deliver the electric jolt and another to read the molecule’s state. But with advances like quantum computing shrinking everything else in the machine, these kinds of breakthroughs just prove that technology is disappearing before our eyes.
(Source: singasongthatcantbesung)
