The Enlightening Science Thread

[Golden]

Post your interesting scientific / new discoveries posts here

BBC News - A Point of View: Science, magic, and madness

 

[Golden]

BBC Science - Are great scientists always heretics?

 

[smarteyeball]

Good thread. Keep it up mate

 

[Layback Bear]

Post your interesting scientific / new discoveries posts here

BBC News - A Point of View: Science, magic, and madness

Great Thread Golden.

 

[Golden]

BBC Science - How do we know the Big Bang happened?

 

[A Guy]

Einstein's Gravity Theory Passes Toughest Test Yet

A strange stellar pair nearly 7,000 light-years from Earth has provided physicists with a unique cosmic laboratory for studying the nature of gravity. The extremely strong gravity of a massive neutron star in orbit with a companion white dwarf star puts competing theories of gravity to a test more stringent than any available before.

Once again, Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915, comes out on top.

Source

A Guy

 

[Golden]

BBC - Future - Science & Environment - How to teach a fish to count

 

[z3r010]

We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK

BBC :sarc:

 

[Golden]

Really? Thats crazy....still works for me

 

[A Guy]

World’s toughest material created by tying slip knots into weak, commercial thread

Nicola Pugno, at the University of Trento in Italy, has succeeded in making by far the toughest material in the world — by taking a conventional piece of fiber… and tying it in a slip knot. This method seems (and is) so simple that the inventor is calling it the Egg of Columbus, which refers to a discovery that has eluded mankind forever — but seems incredibly obvious and easy after the fact.

Source

A Guy

 

[Golden]

Sifting through atmospheres of far-off worlds

 

[Golden]

New craters abound: Mars camera reveals hundreds of impacts each year

 

[Golden]

Comet ISON is hurtling toward uncertain destiny with Sun

 

[Golden]

BBC News - Asteroid 1998 QE2 flies past Earth

 

[A Guy]

Woolly Mammoth Found With Liquid Blood Still In It — Fueling Talks Of Cloning The Animal

A woolly mammoth carcass, still with liquid blood in it, was recently discovered in the Arctic. The 10,000-year-old mammoth was found in the remote New Siberian Islands in the Arctic Ocean. A place where temperatures get as low as -10 Celsius. The mammoth is estimated to have been about 60 years old when it died.

Source

A Guy

 

[Golden]

How's your pareidolia? Rats on Mars?

BBC News - Pareidolia: Why we see faces in hills, the Moon and toasties

 

[Kari]

Magnetic Monopoles Erase Data: Efficient and Long-Lived Storage of Information in Magnetic Vortices

A physical particle postulated 80 years ago, could provide a decisive step toward the realization of novel, highly efficient data storage devices. Scientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), the Technische Universitaet Dresden and the University of Cologne found that with magnetic monopoles in magnetic vortices, called skyrmions, information can be written and erased.

Iron filings strewn on a sheet of paper trace the field lines of a bar magnet below the paper, thereby showing the magnet's north and south poles. No matter how often it is split, the bar magnet always forms a north and a south pole. However, in the early 1930s physicist Paul A. M. Dirac postulated a particle that should, as the magnetic counterpart of the electron, possess only one of the two poles, and should carry just one magnetic elementary charge.

Looking for a simple way to study the magnetic vortices, researchers associated with TUM physicist Prof. Christian Pfleiderer collaborated with Prof. Lukas Eng's group at the Technische Universitaet Dresden, which has a magnetic force microscope. When they scanned the surface of the materials with this microscope, they not only observed the vortices for the first time, but also found that neighboring skyrmions merge with one another.

Full article: Magnetic monopoles erase data: Efficient and long-lived storage of information in magnetic vortices

 

[Britton30]

BBC - Future - Technology - The magic of truth and lies (and iPods)

 

[A Guy]

Eight bronze age boats surface at Fens creek in record find

A fleet of eight prehistoric boats, including one almost nine metres long, has been discovered in a Cambridgeshire quarry on the outskirts of Peterborough.

The vessels, all deliberately sunk more than 3,000 years ago, are the largest group of bronze age boats ever found in the same UK site and most are startlingly well preserved. One is covered inside and out with decorative carving described by conservator Ian Panter as looking "as if they'd been playing noughts and crosses all over it". Another has handles carved from the oak tree trunk for lifting it out of the water. One still floated after 3,000 years and one has traces of fires lit on the wide flat deck on which the catch was evidently cooked.

Source

A Guy

 

[Stephanie]

Wow 3,000-year-old fleet discovered, would like to see that (I make a point of watching Time Team on TV)