Sunday 25 January 2015

Ring Nebula (NASA/Hubble Telescope) Cover For The iPad Mini

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: space, nasa, hubble space telescope, space photography, astronomy, geek present, nerd gift, outer space, rainbow, colorful, star, starry, night sky, astronomer gift

Travel to outer space without leaving the dinner table, when you have these plates featuring this Hubble Telescope image of the Ring Nebula, courtesy of NASA.

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Scientists use ‘NanoVelcro’ and temperature control to extract tumor cells from blood

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An international group led by scientists at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute has developed a new method for effectively

The post Scientists use ‘NanoVelcro’ and temperature control to extract tumor cells from blood has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
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Vintage Astronomy, Celestial, Orion Constellation Posters

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: hunter, constellations, retro, antique, americana, vintage, celestial map, star chart, greek mythlogy, orions belt, antique celestial

Vintage illustration astronomy and celestial map of the stars in the constellation Orion. Orion (a hunter in Greek mythology) is a prominent constellation located on the celestial equator and visible throughout the world. It is one of the largest, most conspicuous, and most recognizable constellations in the night sky. Here Orion can be seen holding a club and the skin and head of a lion.

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Why SpaceX's massive explosion was still a tremendous success

Science Focus

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SpaceX just accomplished something incredible, and no one's paying attention

And even if you are paying attention, you might have heard that SpaceX's latest space launch was a failure. It was actually a success.

The launch had two goals: The first was to supply the International Space Station, and that was successful; but the second one, much more important, was to land the company's Falcon rocket upright so that it could be reused.

The rocket did not land upright. But as an excellent explainer by Business Insider's Jessica Orwig shows, SpaceX actually accomplished almost all its goals. The rocket landed on its platform. But the guiding fins, which help the rocket rotate and steer, ran out of hydraulic fluid, and the rocket crashed on its pad.

It's worth noting a few things here: the stakes; the magnitude of the task; and the nature of the failure.

First, the stakes. Humanity has known how to launch payloads into orbit for well over 50 years now. But humanity still isn't a spacefaring civilization. We haven't been able to turn a space trip into something as routine as a plane trip. We haven't been able to create space colonies or to put a durable foot down in space. One big reason for that is that rockets are enormously expensive. And a reason why rockets are enormously expensive is because each time you use one, it gets destroyed. The space shuttle program was supposed to fix that, but it was just a massively incompetent boondoggle. If you had to blow up a Boeing 747 each time you used it, there would be very little plane flight either. So building a reusable rocket is probably the biggest low-hanging fruit in terms of making space flight affordable.

Second, the magnitude of the task. You can imagine that if building a reusable rocket was easy, we would have done it by now. A rocket is an enormously explode-y thing. It is a massive tube full of combustible material. What's more, it has to go through the atmosphere and back, which is enormously stressful on all the materials. Building a reusable rocket is something we have been failing to master for decades.

Which brings us to, third, the nature of the failure. Almost everything SpaceX tried to do with this launch, they accomplished. They had one tiny failure, which caused the rocket to crash. That is the nature of space stuff. If one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong. But, in terms of engineering, they have leaped much, much closer to the goal than the combined efforts of the governments of the United States, Russia, and Europe have gotten us for decades. Just pause and consider that for a second.

Which is why, even though technically it's true that this launch was only a partial success, we should still pay attention and consider how far we've come, and how enormously impressive this all is.

There is another important point, here: This is being done by a private-sector company. Governments took the first step toward being space-faring, but didn't get us much further because they're, well, governments. Space-age technology is very tricky, but it's still 1960s technology. The problem is not the technology. The problem is human. It is organizational. When the main driver of space exploration is the government, there is too little incentive to innovate, and too much incentive for everything to become a bureaucratic nightmare. This is true even, or especially, when you have private-sector contractors, who combine the worst aspects of business and government bureaucracies.

It's good that we have SpaceX; it would be even better if there were many more entrepreneurial companies like it.

 
#science 
 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/534037/spacexs-massive-explosion-still-tremendous-success
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World’s most complex crystal simulated

Science Focus

original post »

Their “icosahedral quasicrystal” (eye-KO-suh-HE-druhl QUAZ-eye-cris-tahl) looks ordered to the eye, but has no repeating pattern. At the same

The post World’s most complex crystal simulated has been published on Technology Org.

 
#physics 
 » see original post http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TechnologyOrgPhysicsNews/~3/IhJIYeaU3ik/
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2015 is the last binary palindrome year until 2047

Science Focus

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2015 is the last binary palindrome year we'll have until 2047, so enjoy it!

Last year was so 11111011110. That's 2014 in binary, and it looks, well, a little unbalanced. This year though? Behold the beauty of 2015:

11111011111

How symmetrical! How elegant! It reads the same way forwards and backwards! It's a palindrome!

If you need a refresher on how binary numbers work, each digit represents a power of 2. With 11 digits (the number of "bits" needed to represent numbers above 1024) the numbers for each place are as follows:

Add them all together (except for the 32 in the center, which is set to 0) and you get 2015. There will not be another year this symmetrical until 2047, when we hit 11111111111 (which is nice, but a little boring with all that repetition). After that, we go to 12 bits (100000000000, or 2048), hit another symmetrical year in 2049 (100000000001), and then have to wait another 96 years for the next one (100001100001, or 2145).

So live it up. Enjoy the harmony, the balance, and the forward/reverse/any-which-way of it all. Here's to 11111011111. May life's joys be ones and life's troubles be zeros for you and yours.

 
#science 
 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/532691/2015-last-binary-palindrome-year-until-2047
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A Twisted Solar Eruptive Prominence

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Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old

Red Supergiant Star V838 Monocerotis Square Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: envelope sealers, amazing astronomy images, hubble images, monocerotis, supermassive red giant, stars, interstellar dust, swirling dust clouds, monoceros constellation, red supergiant star

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous astronomy picture featuring a distant star, named V838 Monocerotis, in the direction of the constellation of Monoceros on the outer edge of our Milky Way. The image shows the swirls of dust spiralling across trillions of miles of interstellar space, lit mainly from within by a pulse of light from the red supergiant, two years into its journey.

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image code: monocerotis

Image credit: NASA, the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI) and ESA

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via Zazzle Astronomy market place

Orion Nebula Hubble Space Wall Decor

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: orion nebula, nebula, star formation, stars, nasa, astronomy, universe, hubble photo, nature, cool astronomy, milky way, cosmos, esa, outer space, hubble telescope, hubble space telescope, astronomical, cosmology, deep space, space, natural, science, advanced camera for surveys, acs, messier 42, messier 43, space picture, space photo, space image, nebula picture, nebula photo, nebula image, pink, purple, cool space

This Hubble photograph of the Orion Nebula is a great choice for astronomy lovers!

This space photograph shows the massive Orion Nebula, and was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Orion Nebula is the birthplace of many new stars, and over 3000 stars are present in this image, surrounded by swirling clouds of gas and dust. The colours of the original photo have been enhanced slightly, and include rich oranges, pinks and purples.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto ( Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

You can personalise the design further if you'd prefer, such as by adding your name or other text, or adjusting the image - just click 'Customize it' to see all the options. IMPORTANT: If you choose a different sized version of the product, it's important to click Customize and check the image in the Design view to ensure it fills the area to the edge of the product, otherwise white edges may be visible.

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If you like this product, you can find more like it in my store:

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Click here to see a wide range of other astronomy & space designs.

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Turbulent Star-Birth Region Selection Case For The iPad Mini

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!


tagged with: hubble, nasa, stars, star, galaxy, galaxies, space, astronomy, telescope, beautiful, photos, nebula, nature, landscapes

In commemoration of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope completing its 100,000th orbit in its 18th year of exploration and discovery, scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., have aimed Hubble to take a snapshot of a dazzling region of celestial birth and renewal. Hubble peered into a small portion of the nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074 (upper, left). The region is a firestorm of raw stellar creation, perhaps triggered by a nearby supernova explosion. It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our Local Group of galaxies. The three-dimensional-looking image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars. The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars already born in NGC 2074 is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away. Another young cluster may be hidden beneath a circle of brilliant blue gas at center, bottom. In this approximately 100-light-year-wide fantasy-like landscape, dark towers of dust rise above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the molecular cloud. The seahorse-shaped pillar at lower, right is approximately 20 light-years long, roughly four times the distance between our Sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. It is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the LMC are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies. This representative color image was taken on August 10, 2008, with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Red shows emission from sulfur atoms, green from glowing hydrogen, and blue from glowing oxygen. Source: NASA.

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Metasurface solves calculus problems as an analog computer

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Scientists have demonstrated that a 2-D man-made material called a metasurface can perform spatial differentiation and integration, the

The post Metasurface solves calculus problems as an analog computer has been published on Technology Org.

 
#materials 
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Vintage Astronomy, Hydra Snake Constellation Stars Poster

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: sky, serpent, constellations, retro, antique, americana, vintage, celestial map, star chart, astronomy, antique celestial

Vintage illustration astronomy and celestial constellation Hydra the snake. Hydra is the largest of the 88 modern constellations, measuring 1303 square degrees. It has a long history, having been included among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy. It is commonly represented as a water snake.

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Tarantula Nebula Star Forming Gas Cloud Sculpture Rectangle Sticker

Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: envelope sealers, tnlmcsfr, billowing interstellar gas clouds, awesome hubble images, tarantula nebula, large magellanic cloud, star forming activity, young hot stars, star nurseries, outer space photographs, triggering star formation

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series An awesome mobile phone shell featuring the Tarantula Nebula of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is the nearest galaxy to the Milky Way, our galactic home. This Hubble image shows old stars from the distant past and rich, interstellar gas clouds feeding the formation of new ones. The most massive and hottest stars are intense, high-energy radiation sources and this pushes away what remains of the gas and dust, compressing and sculpting it. As the whorls and eddies clump and stretch it, gravity takes over and the birth of the next generation of new stars is triggered.

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image code: tnlmcsfr

Image credit: NASA, the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI) and ESA

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Star GL 490 Green Cluster Space Wall Graphics

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space


tagged with: star photo, star cluster, nebula, star formation, green sky, nasa, universe, outer space, spitzer telescope, cool astronomy, astronomy, glowing, cosmos, cosmic, astronomical, astrophotography, cosmology, deep space, space, nature, natural, science, abstract, space picture, photo, image, stars, picture, light, sparkling, sparkly, starry, twinking, stellar, cool space

This is a NASA space photograph from the GLIMPSE360 survey, showing the star GL 490 (the bright orange star in the centre-right of the photo) and its surroundings. The cloudy green gaseous area is the result of hydrogen and carbon compounds that are used in the formation of new stars. This is a composite image that uses data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS).

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/2MASS/B. Whitney (SSI/University of Wisconsin)

You can personalise the design further if you'd prefer, such as by adding your name or other text, or adjusting the image - just click 'Customize it' to see all the options. IMPORTANT: If you choose a different sized version of the product, it's important to click Customize and check the image in the Design view to ensure it fills the area to the edge of the product, otherwise white edges may be visible.

See more in my shop
If you like this product, you can find more like it in my store:

Click here to view all the other items with this design.

Click here to see a wide range of other astronomy & space designs.

»visit the AstronomyGiftShop store for more designs and products like this
Click to customize.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place