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Electrical activity of the Heart

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MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION  In the constellation of Serpens Caput (Serpent’s Head), this tightly-packed group of galaxies is slowly tearing itself apart.  These beautiful scattered jewels are collectively known as Seyfert’s Sextet, but although the name implies “six,” only four of the visible galaxies are locked in the dance of death. The still-intact spiral galaxy near the middle of the image is about five times more distant than the main group, and the sixth member is actually a tidal tail resulting from gravitational interactions.  The gravitational forces that are warping and blurring these galaxies may someday pull them together into one single galaxy, but such cosmic changes take time. The gravitational interactions we see here happened over billions of years, and the dance is likely to last billions more.  -RLO Image: NASA/ESA, J. English (U. Manitoba), S. Hunsberger, S. Zonak, J. Charlton, S. Gallagher (PSU), and L. Frattare (STScI) Source

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Regulators may let companies store radioactive rods in on-site pools for up to 120 years.

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Abbot Handerson Thayer and others, INSECTS— Colored beetles, landscape, study folder for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, n.d., various media and collage on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the heirs of Abbot Handerson Thayer

-Bridget

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Be a part of the great Internet Slowdown

On September 10th, just a few days before the FCC’s net neutrality comment deadline, internet users and tech companies will unite for the “Internet Slowdown” to show the world what’s at stake if we lose net neutrality, the “First Amendment of the Internet.”

We need everyone’s help right now to make this huge. Here’s what you can do right now to help make the Internet Slowdown go viral:

1. Forward this post to your friends and share the image with your social networks using the buttons above. We need people across the web to know about the slowdown so they can join on September 10th.

2. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook so we can reach you with urgent updates and action items as the big day approaches.

3. If you can, please chip in $10 (or more!) to help make the Internet Slowdown possible. We’re building tools that any website or organization can use to promote their own net neutrality action, because we care about the movement. But it’s not cheap! Help us sustain this critical work.

4. Contact your favorite websites, apps, and online services and ask them to join the Slowdown! Send them to this page: https://BattleForTheNet.com/sept10th

5. If you have your own website or app, put the Internet Slowdown widget on it. If you really want to be an Internet Defender, help out by using your own website to spread the word. It’s as easy as adding the widget/modal code found here:

https://BattleForTheNet.com/sept10th#modal

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The Internet Slowdown is coming, and it's going to be huge.

Hey there,

Exciting news! The Internet Slowdown net neutrality protest planned for September 10th is really taking off. This morning, a dozen of the world’s largest websites announced that they’re joining in a big way. Sites you know and love like Etsy, Kickstarter, Wordpress, Vimeo, Mozilla, Namecheap, Foursquare, imgur, and reddit.

Will you join too?

Everyone has a role in the Internet Slowdown. Click here to find out what YOU can do.

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Scientists Find Evidence for Tectonic Plates on Jupiter’s Moon Europa

Scientists have found evidence of plate tectonics on Jupiter’s moon Europa. This indicates the first sign of this type of surface-shifting geological activity on a world other than Earth.

Researchers have clear visual evidence of Europa’s icy crust expanding. However, they could not find areas where the old crust was destroyed to make room for the new. While examining Europa images taken by NASA’s Galileo orbiter in the early 2000s, planetary geologists Simon Kattenhorn, of the University of Idaho, Moscow, and Louise Prockter, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, discovered some unusual geological boundaries.

"We have been puzzled for years as to how all this new terrain could be formed, but we couldn’t figure out how it was accommodated," said Prockter. "We finally think we’ve found the answer."

Plate tectonics is the scientific theory that Earth’s outer layer is made up of plates or blocks that move, which accounts for why mountain and volcanoes form and earthquakes happen…

(read more: Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Image: Noah Kroese, I.NK

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Who speaks for Earth?

“Don’t sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.”

— Carl Sagan

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Why do the dots disappear? Nature News via Why Evolution Is True

This is one of the most baffling illusions I've ever seen.

Take a look at the gif above. First, look at any yellow dot as the figure moves. The yellow dot remains present and stationary.

If you concentrate on all three yellow dots, they remain there as well.

But now concentrate on the central green dot. You will see one or more of the yellow dots disappearing and then reappearing sporadically. They are not—this is an optical illusion.

The dots remain and your brain simply doesn't register their presence from time to time. Weird, eh?

Continue reading in "Why Evolution Is True" ..,.

Check out the original at Nature News and Comment ...

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stem cell in the eye of a needle

colored SEM

credit: Steve Gschmeissner

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Via asapscience on Facebook.

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OVER 9K SPECIES SHOW FIRTS ATLAS OF MARINE LIFE FROM ANTARCTICA

Details about the marine life of 9000 species that inhabit Antarctica, from tiny microbes to large cetaceans were collected for the first time in an atlas on the remote and icy southern seas. The ‘Biogeographic Atlas of the Southern Ocean’ was developed over four years by an international team of marine biologists and oceanographers and contributions of more than a hundred scientists from Australia, New Zealand, USA, France, Belgium, Spain or Chile. This work, coordinated by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and presented at a scientific conference held in New Zealand this week, contains 66 chapters, complete and comprehensive data of some 9,000 species and 800 maps and 100 color photographs. Researcher compiled data on the occurrence, evolution, genetic changes and effects of climate change on all of them.

The database described from microorganisms to large cetaceans

Over a hundred of scientists have worked on the atlas for four years

Still fall outside the description 1,000 to 2,000 species

First chapter is available free

MORE iATLAS

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Lighting up the Night

Humans are not nocturnal creatures. Our eyes have adapted to living in the light, and over the last few hundred years, we have slowly brightened the night so we can inhabit it more freely. Half the world is haloed in networks of light that shine so brightly they can be seen in space, but while they may look beautiful from above, there are consequences. Badly-designed lighting often shines light in all directions instead of just where it’s wanted, and this extra light washes out the darkness and pollutes the sky with brightness, altering natural light levels. Because light is such a powerful biological force, this messes with the rhythms animals including ourselves have adapted to—for example, birds migrating at night become disoriented by unnatural light, and are especially apt to collide with brilliantly-lit buildings. The vacant orange haze that light pollution casts across the sky also empties it of stars. This is why most observatories are located in isolated places, which is sad because the average person can no longer lift their eyes to see the universe above—the infinite canvas of stars and planets and galaxies is unknown to them. Remedying this pollution is relatively simple: altering the design of light installations can immediately block wasted light, helping to save energy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Flagstaff, Arizona, made one of the earliest efforts to minimise light pollution to protect the nearby Lowell Observatory, and it became the first International Dark Sky City in 2001. Many other places have made the same efforts and have become Dark Sky Preserves—sanctuaries free from artificial light, where the darkness is kept so pristine that the universe soars above.

(Image Credit: Jim Richardson)

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In which direction is the cube spinning? Now blink, or look away and look back. Is it still spinning in the same direction?

A Necker Cube is an ambiguous line drawing. Our brain can create different interpretations of it.

This clip was part of the Christmas Lectures 2011 presented by Professor Bruce Hood - Lecture One: What’s in your head? Watch it in full on the Ri Channel.

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Radio and television broadcasting may be only a brief passing phase in our technological development. When we imagine alien civilizations broadcasting signals with radio telescopes, are we any different from earlier generations who imagined riding cannon shells to the moon? Civilizations even slightly more advanced than ours may have already moved on to some other mode of communication, one that we have yet to discover or even imagine. Their messages could be swirling all around us at this very moment, but we lack the means to perceive them just as all of our ancestors, up to a little more than a century ago, would have been oblivious to the most urgent radio signal from another world. 

But there’s another more troubling possibility: Civilizations, like other living things, may only live so long before perishing due to natural causes, or violence, or self-inflicted wounds. Whether or not we ever make contact with intelligent alien life may depend on a critical question: What is the life expectancy of a civilization?

- Episode 11: The Immortals, Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey

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This year’s Longitude Prize is focused on the growing problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria. They’ve put together a nice image, shown here, which showcases what they term ‘the ten most dangerous antibiotic resistant bacteria’. You can read more detail on each of them here:http://www.nesta.org.uk/news/antibiotic-resistant-bacteria The prize offers a £10 million prize fund for the development of a cheap, accurate, and easy to use bacterial infection test kit, which will allow doctors to prescribe the correct antibiotics at the correct time for patients, to try to help minimise the development of antibiotic resistance.