Saturday 28 February 2015

Tarantula Nebula Star Forming Gas Cloud Sculpture iPad Mini Cases

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: billowing interstellar gas clouds, awesome hubble images, star forming activity, star nurseries, tarantula nebula, triggering star formation, large magellanic cloud, hrbstslr tnlmcsfr, cosmological, galaxies, young hot stars

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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Scientists Develop Telescopic Contact Lenses to Help People with Severe Eye Problems

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During this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Eric Tremblay from the

The post Scientists Develop Telescopic Contact Lenses to Help People with Severe Eye Problems has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Vintage Astronomy, Celestial Star Chart, Sky Map Print

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


tagged with: constellations, retro, sky, americana, nostalgia, nostalgic, vintage illustration, star chart, celestial map, astronomy, antique celestial

Vintage illustration astronomy and celestial map or antique star chart image featuring the constellations of the northern night sky including some signs of the zodiac, Pegasus, Ursa Major (Bear) and Orion the Hunter by English mathematician and physician Thomas Hood (1556-1620). Created in 1590.

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No, plants don't have feelings

Science Focus

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Why on Earth would somebody seriously entertain the notion that plants have feelings? One possible answer might be that the topic is too seductive to ignore. When Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird gave in to seduction and published The Secret Lives of Plants: A Fascinating Account of the Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Relations Between Plants and Man in 1973 they were roundly accused of pseudoscience. But no matter: The book was a hit.

And a hit is blood in the water for scribblers seeking popular subjects to elucidate. Thus the book's swift dismissal by mainstream science hasn't deterred food writers such as Michael Pollan from resurrecting the Nixon-era volume and noting, as he did last year in The New Yorker, that The Secret Lives of Plants "had made its mark on the culture" — as if that qualification alone (people were hooked!) is a legitimate reason to exhume the idea and re-explore its highly suspect merits.

It's not, of course. In fact, the spate of recent media attention on the potential emotional lives of plants is — as I see it — little more than pandering to basic scientific illiteracy through semantic sleights-of-hand. Very recently (in light of this trend) several dozen leading plant scientists sought to set the record straight. They rejected the idea of plant intelligence altogether, noting that "there is no evidence for structures such as neurons, synapses, or a brain in plants."

Undeterred, Pollan (who quotes this disapproving assessment in his article) nonetheless plowed ahead with a New Yorker-feature's worth of ink on the possibility of plant intelligence because "there will probably always be a strain of romanticism running through our thinking about plants." In other words, there's no proven merit to this half-baked idea — and he quotes a bevy of scientists saying as much — but, what the hell, if people are just moony enough to think there is let's leave it on the warming rack.

To be fair, Pollan — who is fully aware that The Secret Life of Plants was crackpot science — reminds us of something important: the underlying notion of plants being intelligent, or having feelings, isn't made out of whole cloth. Plants can be remarkably responsive to external stimuli in a way that might seem reflective of situational decision-making. In his recent book What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses, plant scientist Alan Chapelski demonstrates that plants possess far more complicated sensory mechanisms than we've typically appreciated. These mechanisms enable plants to behave in ways that approximate the human understanding of smelling danger, sensing weather, and maybe even responding to noise. There's now no question that plants, as Chapelski said in an interview, "are complex organisms that live rich, sensual lives." So there is that. A plant, we should all agree, is more neurologically relevant than a shoe.

But to exploit these findings to suggest that plants really "think" or have "feelings" in the vertebrate sense is a different matter altogether. Making this move — one that seriously asks us to compare the sentience of a pig and a pumpkin — requires either distorting the nature of thought and feeling beyond recognition or making a leap in logic no different than global warming deniers make when they suggest that the atmosphere — you never know — would have warmed without anthropocentric influence.

Chapelski, for one, knows better than to go there. "Plants exhibit elements of anoetic consciousness which doesn't include, in my understanding, the ability to think," he has said. "Just as a plant can't suffer subjective pain in the absence of a brain, I also don't think that it thinks." Which brings us back to the original question: Why have so many journalists picked up on a renegade hypothesis — one without a shred of hard evidence — and unleashed the idea that plants might be sentient, intelligent beings?

A pretty good hint of an answer comes from a tweet Pollan put out some time ago. Commenting on an article that described how plants communicate, he alerted the masses, "Cool piece on how pea plants communicate with one another, possibly raising some tough issues for vegetarians." Emphasis mine.

Pollan was kidding. But still, he raises a point that less judicious critics of vegetarianism embrace: plant sentience, if a reality, undermines the vegetarian ethic. Vegetarians choose to avoid eating animals because animals suffer to become food. In turn, they replace animal flesh with plant-based food. But if plants suffer as well as animals, the vegetarian can no longer claim the moral high ground. His pedestal gets kicked to the curb.

For conscientious carnivores — a rarified band of gourmands who reject industrial animal agriculture but refuse to give up eating boutiquely rendered animal products — plant sentience would once and for all shut down those nagging animal rights creeps who ask: "How do we grant animals moral standing and still eat them?" Pollan, who has struggled with this question, would certainly breathe a sigh of relief.

If my argument here is right — that is, if the foodie emphasis on intelligent plants is little more than curiosity obscuring ideology — there's still something for vegetarians to learn from the challenge, disingenuous though it might be.

For one, as the concept of plant intelligence circulates, vegetarians would be wise to seek a solid, no-nonsense response to it. It won't do to simply say, "That's crazy talk, man!" The best bet on this score is an excerpt from Oliver Sacks, who elaborates the fundamental distinction between plants and animals in evolutionary and cellular terms. Focusing on the speed with which ions move though ion channels across synapses in plants and animals — thereby allowing thought — he explains:

The calcium ion channels that plants rely on do not support rapid or repetitive signaling between cells; once a plant action potential is generated, it cannot be repeated at a fast enough rate to allow, for example, the speed with which a worm 'dashes … into its burrow.' Speed requires ions and ion channels that can open and close in a matter of milliseconds, allowing hundreds of action potentials to be generated in a second. The magic ions, here, are sodium and potassium ions, which enabled the development of rapidly reacting muscle cells, nerve cells, and neuromodulation at synapses. These made possible organisms [i.e., animals] that could learn, profit by experience, judge, act, and finally think.

The second (and more controversial) thing vegetarians might do (after figuring out Sacks' explanation) is, given the intelligent plant push, to take the proposition of sentient life in the other direction — into the animal kingdom — and ask if the criterion of sentience denied to plants should also be denied to certain animals.

After all, basic intellectual honesty demands that humans acknowledge that animal life is spread across a continuum of emotion and reason and, in turn, that our moral consideration of animals depends in part on where they fall on this spectrum. Oysters and insects come to mind as possibly fair game for ethical consumption. Look at it this way: Without technical vegetarians to pick on, maybe the advocates of plant brilliance would stop reaching for straws and, instead, take a closer look at the animals that we know for sure possess intelligence and, when they are raised to feed us, suffer.

Pacific Standard grapples with the nation's biggest issues by illuminating why we do what we do. For more on the science of society, sign up for its weekly email update or subscribe to its bimonthly print magazine.

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Why scientists make promises they can't keep

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Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, recently made people angry when he linked budget cuts to the slow progress on an Ebola vaccine. Without the decade-long erosion of the NIH budget, he told Sam Stein of the Huffington Post, "we would have been a year or two ahead of where we are, which would have made all the difference." The push-back was immediate. Collins' claim was dissected by the media and countered by one of Collins' own colleagues, the head of the NIH unit that oversees Ebola research. Many other scientists disagreed as well. University of California-Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen called Collins' comments "complete bullshit."

Why such an angry response? After all, it's undeniably true that the NIH budget has been ailing for a decade. The NIH's purchasing power has dropped by as much as 21 percent since 2004, a consequence of inflation and flat or shrinking appropriations by Congress. Research, including Ebola research, has inevitably been scaled back.

Most critics expressed some version of the argument made by Eisen: "It is a gross overtrivialization of even the directed scientific process involved in developing vaccines to suggest that simply by spending more money on something you are guaranteed a product. And, if I were in Congress, frankly I'd be sick of hearing this kind of baloney, and would respond with a long list of things I'd been promised by previous NIH directors if only we'd spend more money on them." In other words, you can't simply buy the scientific results you want.

This puts scientists in an awkward position. After all, one of the main reasons that our government funds scientific research is because we expect it to produce tangible benefits. The rationale for government-funded research was laid out in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, the top U.S. science official during World War II, who argued for generous government support of peace-time research that will "bring higher standards of living, will lead to the prevention or cure of diseases, will promote conservation of our limited national resources, and will assure means of defense against aggression." For six decades we've been committed to Bush's vision, spending billions of taxpayer dollars on science each year, not to subsidize intellectual curiosity, but to obtain concrete outcomes like an Ebola vaccine. This means that scientists who accept this money have to strike a delicate balance when they pitch their work to society — they need to promise definite results, while acknowledging that there are no guarantees in science. If they promise too much, it looks like pandering; if they don't promise enough, then they're asking the government to pay for their intellectual hobby. Francis Collins knows how this game is played as well as any scientist, but this time he flubbed it.

It's a problem faced by scientists at all levels, not just those who lobby Congress for money. Researchers who want to keep the lights on in the lab quickly learn how to put the right spin on their work. When my colleagues and I submitted a proposal to the NIH for a basic research project on fruit fly embryos, we played up the medical angle of our work, discussing its relevance to congenital malformations and various types of cancer. The NIH declined to fund the proposal, so we submitted it to the National Science Foundation instead. The NSF, less lavishly funded than the NIH, is extremely wary about supporting anything that belongs on the medical turf of the NIH. So we completely reversed course in our proposal and put in a paragraph explaining why our research was unrelated to human health in any direct way. We got the money.

Were we dishonest when we initially claimed our work was medically relevant? Absolutely not — my colleagues and I are basic scientists, but we are employed by medical schools. Our research fits comfortably within the missions of both the NSF and the NIH. The reviewers and officials at both agencies understand this; we weren't deceiving anyone. But we had to play the game and pitch our work in a way that was consistent with the goals of a particular agency.

Researchers are required to do this in part because the science agencies themselves have to pitch their research portfolio to society — particularly to members of Congress who are responsible for making sure that society is getting something back for its research dollars. It's easy to point to the past and argue that basic research has an excellent record. There would be no iPhone without the fundamental scientific discoveries of the past half-century that made solid-state electronics, processor architectures, and long-lasting batteries possible. But it is much more difficult to point to ongoing research and make credible promises about future benefits. An HIV vaccine would save more lives around the world than an Ebola vaccine, but we still don't have one, despite decades of sustained funding.

To justify their usefulness, scientists will continue to make promises, but those promises should be ones they can keep. The dust-up over Collins' remarks shows that we, scientists and society, need to be more honest about the uncertainty inherent in the scientific process and in any projection of society's future needs. The NIH has long had a strategic plan in place to develop vaccines for many emerging infectious diseases, including Ebola. It was impossible to predict that there would be an urgent need this year for an Ebola vaccine, instead of one for, say, the SARS virus. And even if we could predict such a thing, researchers couldn't guarantee that an Ebola vaccine would be ready when it was most needed. But without money for this type of research, we can guarantee that a vaccine would never be ready.

Pacific Standard grapples with the nation's biggest issues by illuminating why we do what we do. For more on the science of society, sign up for its weekly email update or subscribe to its bimonthly print magazine.

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 » see original post http://theweek.com/articles/442533/scientists-make-promises-cant-keep
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All Sky Fireball Network cameras pick up a fireball over Pennsylvania

Science Focus

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NASA has a lot of programs that don't always capture the public's attention the way, say, a rover on Mars does. But its All Sky Fireball Network, a collection of 15 cameras pointed at the sky, has grabbed a bit of attention today by catching one of its objects of interest as it lit up the skies over Pennsylvania.

NASA's meteor watch group has used its Facebook page to provide some of the basic stats on the rock that generated this fireball: a bit over half a meter in diameter but about 250 kg, it was moving at a speed of over 70,000 km/hour as it entered the atmosphere moving west to east. It was tracked descending from 60 miles in altitude down to 13 miles.

The video below shows the images of the visitor captured by one of the All Sky Fireball Network's cameras.

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Moon-Venus-Mars Skyline

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Taken on February 20, five different exposures made in rapid succession were used to created this tantalizing telephoto image. In combination, they reveal a wide range of brightness visible to the eye on that frigid evening, from the urban glow of the Quebec City skyline to the triple conjunction of Moon, Venus and Mars. Shortly after sunset the young Moon shows off its bright crescent next to brilliant Venus. Fainter Mars is near the top of the frame. Though details in the Moon's sunlit crescent are washed out, features on the dark, shadowed part of the lunar disk are remarkably clear. Still lacking city lights the lunar night is illuminated solely by earthshine, light reflected from the sunlit side of planet Earth.
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Star Cloud Wall Decal

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


tagged with: star cloud, stars, space, astronomy, clouds, outer space, nebulae, astronauts, science, scientist, exploration, hubble, space pictures, space photographs, outer space pictures

A picture of a star cloud in a star forming region of space.

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Desiderata Poem, Constellation Cygnus, The Swan iPad Mini Cases

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: full desiderata, desiderata poem, noise and haste, go placidly, awesome hubble images, star forming activity, constellation cygnus, the swan, hrbstslr cygsb, cosmological, new star s106ir, star nurseries, young hot stars, interstellar gas clouds, star birth, glowing hydrogen, turbulence

Inspirational Guidance series

A gorgeous iPad Mini case featuring the full Desiderata by Max Ehrmann: Go placidly amidst the noise and haste... with an image of a star forming region in Constellation Cygnus (The Swan). This Hubble picture shows a dust-rich, interstellar gas cloud with a new-born star in the centre of the hour-glass shape.

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Image code: cygsb

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

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Voltage tester for beating cardiac cells

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For the first time, scientists have succeeded in recording the current in membrane channels of contracting cardiac cells.

The post Voltage tester for beating cardiac cells has been published on Technology Org.

 
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Vintage Astronomy Celestial Planet Planetary Orbit Poster

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Vintage illustration Renaissance era astronomy and antique celestial image featuring a planisphere, spheres with signs of the zodiac and planets, created in 1660 by Andreas Cellarius. Planetary orbits, from The Celestial Atlas, or the Harmony of the Universe. Andreas Cellarius (c.1596-1665) was a Dutch-German cartographer, best known for his Harmonia Macrocosmica of 1660, a major star atlas, published by Johannes Janssonius in Amsterdam.

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Life 'not as we know it' possible on Saturn's moon Titan

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A new type of methane-based, oxygen-free life form that can metabolize and reproduce similar to life on Earth has been modeled. It is theorized to have a cell membrane, composed of small organic nitrogen compounds and capable of functioning in liquid methane temperatures of 292 degrees below zero.

via Science Daily

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Welcome to the Space Room Decal

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


tagged with: astronomy, stars, science, astonomy, space, universe, nebula, planets, cosmological, space travel, planet, star, discovery, explore, exploring, fantasy, sci, fiction, orbit, orbital, travel, research, cosmonaut, astronaut, spaceship, starship

Waiting for clearance in geostationary orbit to leave the home planet and explore new worlds in outer space. Digital artwork by Liz Molnar. Planets, stars, space clouds, lights were made with basic Photoshop effects and brushes, planets' surfaces created from photos.

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