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planetary nebula & white dwarf: like diamond engagement ring

astronomers find 'diamond engagement ring' in space at abell 33 / 04.09.2014 / elizabeth landau / cnn

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope has captured a spectacular image of a planetary nebula aligned with a star in such a way that it looks like a diamond engagement ring.

Abell 33 came from a star that's going to become a white dwarf, which is one way that a star can evolve at the end of its life. White dwarfs are small, dense and hot, and they cool down over billions of years.

[thecultureddish]

amyloid fibril proteins: like gloopy velcro hooks

rise of the living chair: boffins recruit e coli to build futuristic materials / 03.23.2014 / jack clark / the register

... MIT researchers were able to put bacteria to work producing conducting biofilms, some of which were studded with quantum dots, and arranging gold nanowires. This paves the way for the development of mass manufactured cell-based material factories, and even "living materials" that have some of the desirable properties of bones or trees, Lu confirmed.

They were able to do this by using E. coli, which naturally creates biofilms containing amyloid fibril proteins which, somewhat like the hooks in Velcro, help it attach to surfaces. The hooks on this gloopy velcro are made from a repeating chain of protein units called CsgA, which can be modified by adding peptides, which can be used to let parts of the film capture specific materials, like gold nanoparticles.

[thecultureddish]

yellowstone: like the seven-book harry potter series

yellowstone holds answers to sciences mysteries / 03.23.2014 / christine peterson / sf chronicle

[Yellowstone National Park Geologist Henry] Heasler tells schoolchildren on tours that Yellowstone is like the seven-book Harry Potter series and that scientists understand only the first paragraph of the first novel.

[thecultureddish]

cosmic inflation: drunk falling on a hill

our universe just may exist in a multiverse after all, cosmic inflation discovery suggests / 03.19.2014 / miriam kramer / huffington post

[Stanford University theoretical physicist Andrei] Linde, one of the main contributers to inflation theory, says that if the known universe is just one bubble, there must be many other bubbles in the cosmic fabric.

"Think about some unstable state," Linde explained. "You are standing on a hill, and you can fall in this direction, you can fall in that direction, and if you're drunk, eventually you must fall. Inflation is instability of our space with respect to its expansion."

[thecultureddish]

anzu wyliei: the chicken from hell

'chicken from hell dinosaur' gets a proper name / 03.20.2014 / malcolm ritter / boston globe

It’s called the chicken from hell: a birdlike dinosaur some 7 feet tall that weighed around 500 pounds when it roamed western North America on its long, slender hind legs.

...

The creature was formally introduced to the scientific community Wednesday as scientists published a description and analysis of its anatomy, and finally bestowed a name: Anzu wyliei. The moniker comes from a mythological feathered demon plus the name of a Carnegie museum trustee’s grandson.

[thecultureddish]

the encode project: like google maps

bits of mystery dna, far from 'junk,' play crucial role / 09.06.2012 / gina kolata / new york times

“It’s Google Maps,” said Eric Lander, president of the Broad Institute, a joint research endeavor of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [in reference to the Encode Project]. In contrast, the project’s predecessor, the Human Genome Project, which determined the entire sequence of human DNA, “was like getting a picture of Earth from space,” he said. “It doesn’t tell you where the roads are, it doesn’t tell you what traffic is like at what time of the day, it doesn’t tell you where the good restaurants are, or the hospitals or the cities or the rivers.”

[thecultureddish]

accretionary prisms: like sideways-shooting wedges

tsunami made worse by 'pop up' of sediments / 08.24.2012 / jason palmer / bbc news

The [accretionary] prism is a collection of loose rock and mud that builds up gradually as one [tectonic] plate slips below another and fragments are broken off each.

When the plates finally violently slip, the point of the wedge is squeezed. This fires the material upward and outward, turning the energy of the plate into the energy of the ejected rock.

"Let's say you have something wedge-shaped on the floor and you jump on it, the wedge will shoot sideways, and that's we think happens," Prof [Dan] McKenzie of [Cambridge University] explained.

[thecultureddish]

solar storm propagation: like shooting bullets

short-circuiting civilization: predicting the disruptive potential of a solar storm is more art than science / 08.23.2012 / saswato r. das / scientific american

"For the first time, space weather forecasters now have models and tools for predicting how a CME [coronal mass ejection] is released from the sun, accelerated out into the solar wind, and ultimately ends up colliding with Earth's magnetosphere creating the geomagnetic storms that impact so many technologies and systems," says Rodney Viereck of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Environment Center. Viereck's team is responsible for forecasts of geomagnetic storms caused by solar outbursts.

The first factor that influences whether a CME will be disruptive is the direction in which the charged particles are emitted. "Solar storms propagate like a bullet," says Tamas Gombosi, director of the Center of Space Environment Modeling at the University of Michigan. "Sometimes the bullets miss the Earth. When they originate far from the [sun's] central meridian that is facing the Earth, they miss the Earth."

[thecultureddish]

gibbon acoustic and physiological mechanisms: analagous to human soprano singing

why did japanese scientists make apes inhale helium? / 08.23.2012 / ben hirschler / christian science monitor

Singing is particularly important to gibbons, which use loud calls and songs to communicate across the dense jungle. Their exchanges, described by primatologists as "duets", can carry as far as two kilometers (just over one mile).

"Our data indicate that acoustic and physiological mechanisms used in gibbon singing are analogous to human soprano singing, a professional operatic technique," [Takeshi] Nishimura and colleagues wrote in a study in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology on Thursday.

[thecultureddish]

adenosine triphosphate: the currency of energy transfer in living things

photosynthesis-like process found in insects / 08.22.2012 / kathryn lougheed / nature

Carotenoids are responsible for aphid pigmentation, and an aphid's colour determines the kind of predators that can see it. The body colour of Robichon's lab aphids is affected by environmental conditions, with the cold favouring green aphids, optimal conditions resulting in orange ones and white ones appearing when the population is large and faced with limited resources.

When the researchers measured the aphids’ levels of ATP — the ‘currency’ of energy transfer in all living things — the results were striking. Green aphids, which contain high levels of carotenoids, make significantly more ATP than do white ones, which are almost devoid of these pigments. Moreover, ATP production rose when the orange insects — which contain an intermediate amount of carotenoids — were placed in the light, and fell when they were moved into the dark.

[thecultureddish]

arctic sea ice: the world's air conditioner

arctic sea ice likely to hit record low next week / 08.21.2012 / deborah zabarenko / reuters uk

The amount of sea ice in the Arctic is important because this region is a potent global weather-maker, sometimes characterized as the world's air conditioner. This year, the loss of sea ice in the Arctic has suggested a possible opening of the Northwest Passage north of Canada and Alaska and the Northern Sea Route by Europe and Siberia.

[thecultureddish]

earwig fights: like arm wrestling

dueling earwigs gain an edge in asymmetry / 08.20.2012 / sindya n. bhanoo / new york times

Male earwigs fight one another when foraging, so the researchers staged battles between males. They found that larger males always dominated smaller males, but when two small males encountered each other, the one with more asymmetrical forceps won the battle.

“It’s basically a type of an arm wrestling, where they mostly tend to wrestle their right arm versus their left arm,” said Andrew Zink, a behavioral ecologist at San Francisco State University and one of the study’s authors. He and his colleague Nicole Munoz, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, published their findings in the journal Ethology.

[thecultureddish]

radiation belt storm probes: like ants on corks floating in a bucket of water

space probes focus on radiation belts / 08.20.2012 / carolyn y. johnson / the boston globe

The [Radiation Belt Storm Probe] mission is expected to yield a fuller understanding of the dynamic nature of the radiation belts than past missions because it will gather more detailed data. It will place the satellites outfitted with identical instruments in close, but different orbits, and the information collected will be compared.

[Deputy project scientist Nicky] Fox compared it to an ant standing atop a cork floating in a bucket full of water. If the cork in the bucket rises, the ant won’t be able to tell whether that is caused by a wave rippling through the bucket or someone adding water to the bucket. But if an ant sits on another cork nearby and they can compare observations, the first ant can tell what caused the rise.

[thecultureddish]

microthruster propulsion: like tree capillaries

MIT-developed 'microthrusters' could propel small satellites / 08.17.2012 / jennifer chu / MIT news office

To explain how the [MIT-developed rocket micro]thruster works, [designer and MIT associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics Paulo] Lozano invokes the analogy of a tree: Water from the ground is pulled up a tree through a succession of smaller and smaller pores, first in the roots, then up the trunk, and finally through the leaves, where sunshine evaporates the water as gas. Lozano’s microthruster works by a similar capillary action: Each layer of metal contains smaller and smaller pores, which passively suck the ionic liquid up through the chip, to the tops of the metallic tips. 

[thecultureddish]

internal solar rotation: like traffic moving @ different speeds

sun is the most perfect sphere ever observed in nature / 08.16.2012 / geraint jones / the guardian 

[O]bservations [of the sun's measurements] are key to learning about the sun's interior, which rotates at different speeds like traffic moving at different speeds on a motorway. This speed distribution can be inferred from measurements of the star's shape and the way that it wobbles. The new measurement indicates that the outer layers are moving more slowly than expected: Kuhn suggests that turbulence under the surface is probably the cause.

[thecultureddish]

sneezing: like ctrl-alt-del for your nose

why do we sneeze? / 08.14.12 / christine dell'amore / national geographic

[A University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia VA Medical Center] study found that the burst of air produced by a sneeze not only clears nasal passages but also triggers the cilia sensors to kick the paddles into high gear for an extended period—about a couple minutes—[otolaryngologist and study co-author Noam] Cohen said.

In that sense, a sneeze works by "resetting the system—like Control-Alt-Delete" on a PC, he said.