The Enlightening Science Thread

[ICIT2LOL]

The 68th observance of the first use of a nuclear device in war is on Tuesday August 6th.

You can use this interactive Sim to estimate the effects of "Little Boy" (15kt) on your local area.
NUKEMAP2 by Alex Wellerstein

• There are presets. If your town is not on the list you can drag the map pointer to your chosen location.
• Click on the Advanced Options arrow to open it for more options.
• If you don't want to log your anonymous usage data, click on the check box at the bottom aside the Auto-Zoom check box.
• Once you click on the "Detonate" button it takes several seconds to calculate the estimated fatalities and estimated injuries.

There is also a 3D Sim. It can be reached by this link or at the top right of the 2D map: NUKEMAP3D by Alex Wellerstein
Settings are similar, one difference I found was in placing the location. Instead of dragging the pointer you had to drag google earth to your chosen location, then click on the "Place Target" button.

Top site Anak thanks have a watch at this probably one the most evil sights one could imagine
and reminds me of J. Robert Oppenheimer's quote "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds".

 

[Britton30]

I am fascinated by the nuclear blast videos.

 

[A Guy]

12 months of NASA’s Curiosity rover in 2 minutes

Can you believe it has been almost a year since NASA’s Curiosity rover arrived on Mars aboard it’s crazy rocket sled? It has spent those months rolling around the Martian surface, scooping up clumps of soil and drilling holes as it performs experiments. In celebration of one year on Mars, NASA has assembled a video of Curiosity’s time on the Red Planet.

Source

A Guy

 

[A Guy]

Genetic Adam and Eve may have walked on Earth at the same time

All scientific evidence points to the fact that if you go far enough back, all life on Earth is related through common ancestry. Turns out that applying the same sort of analysis shows that all humans alive today are descendants of one man and one woman who walked our planet thousands of years ago.

For several decades, there has been debate about when these ancestors, popularly known as Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, existed. Two studies published this week find that there is a good chance Adam and Eve may have existed about the same time, evolutionarily speaking.

Source

A Guy

 

[A Guy]

Simulating 1 second of real brain activity takes 40 minutes and 83K processors

A team of Japanese and German researchers have carried out the largest-ever simulation of neural activity in the human brain, and the numbers are both amazing and humbling.

The hardware necessary to simulate the activity of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses (just 1 percent of a brain’s total neural network) for 1 biological second: 82,944 processors on the K supercomputer and 1 petabyte of memory (24 bytes per synapse). That 1 second of biological time took 40 minutes, on one of the world’s most-powerful systems, to compute.

Source

A Guy

 

[ICIT2LOL]

I am fascinated by the nuclear blast videos.

Gary the you would be interested in this site where I get some good wallpaper material from

Mushroom Cloud Picture Gallery

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Simulating 1 second of real brain activity takes 40 minutes and 83K processors

A team of Japanese and German researchers have carried out the largest-ever simulation of neural activity in the human brain, and the numbers are both amazing and humbling.

The hardware necessary to simulate the activity of 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses (just 1 percent of a brain’s total neural network) for 1 biological second: 82,944 processors on the K supercomputer and 1 petabyte of memory (24 bytes per synapse). That 1 second of biological time took 40 minutes, on one of the world’s most-powerful systems, to compute.

Source

A Guy

Yep amazing stuff Bill we were taught that all humans are born with enough brain cells that even at the rate of loss of 10,000 per day we have enough to last more than 200 years - that is if you don't lose them at a very fast rate eerrmm like me LOL!!

PS I should have said also that is for normal brain processing not in toto

 

[A Guy]

PS I should have said also that is for normal brain processing not in toto

How about the Scarecrow?

A Guy

 

[ICIT2LOL]

PS I should have said also that is for normal brain processing not in toto

How about the Scarecrow?

A Guy

:roflmaoidn't think turnips had brains??

 

[Golden]

Voyager 1 has left the solar system

 

[A Guy]

Kepler Spacecraft Disabled; "Exciting Discoveries" Still to Come

The Kepler spacecraft, which has revolutionized our understanding of the vast number of exoplanets beyond our solar system, has been damaged beyond repair, NASA officials said today.

The space agency reported the end of the observing phase of the Kepler mission today, saying that one of three working rotating wheels that helped keep the spacecraft steady as it collected images cannot be repaired.

Kepler Spacecraft Disabled; "Exciting Discoveries" Still to Come

A Guy

 

[Anak]

An experimental reusable rocket built by the private spaceflight company SpaceX has soared though a series of ever-higher test flights over its Texas launch site, but it may have just taken its most awesome leap yet: a sideways rocket hop.

Nicknamed Grasshopper, the rocket prototype successfully performed a sideways "divert" test yesterday (Aug. 13) at SpaceX's proving grounds in McGregor, Texas. SpaceX released an amazing video of the sideways Grasshopper rocket flight today (Aug. 14).

The new video shows SpaceX's Grasshopper launching to an altitude of 820 feet (250 meters). The rocket then went into a hover mode, moved 328 feet (100 m) sideways, and then returned back to the center of its launch pad. From launch to landing, the flight lasted just over one minute.

Source: SpaceX's Reusable 'Grasshopper' Rocket Leaps Sideways In Amazing Test Flight (Video) | Space.com

 

[A Guy]

Scanning the Internet in 45 Minutes

The Internet is a big thing. Or, more accurately, a big collection of things. Figuring out exactly how many things, and what vulnerabilities those things contain has always been a challenge for researchers, but a new tool released by a group from the University of Michigan that is capable of scanning the entire IPv4 address space in less than an hour.

There have been a handful of Internet-wide scans done by various organizations over the years, but most of them have not had a security motivation. And they can take days or weeks, depending upon how the scan is done and what the researchers were trying to accomplish. But the new Zmap tool built by the Michigan researchers has the ability to perform an Internet-wide scan in about 45 minutes while running on an ordinary server. The tool, which the team presented at the USENIX Security conference last week, is open-source and freely available for other researchers to use.

Source

A Guy

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Mass (forgive pun) of info in here I like the thermal and electrical properties stuff.

The Photographic Periodic Table of the Elements

 

[A Guy]

Space Slinky: Jet of Superheated Gas -- 5,000 Light-Years Long -- Ejected from Supermassive Black Hole

More than thirteen years of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to assemble time-lapse movies of a 5,000-light-year-long jet of superheated gas being ejected from a supermassive black hole in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87.

Source

A Guy

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Space Slinky: Jet of Superheated Gas -- 5,000 Light-Years Long -- Ejected from Supermassive Black Hole

More than thirteen years of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to assemble time-lapse movies of a 5,000-light-year-long jet of superheated gas being ejected from a supermassive black hole in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87.

Source

A Guy

Nice one Bill hard to imagine the forces involved eh?

PS I forgot to include this on my lat post re the periodic table

http://www.periodictable.com/About/SiteFeatures/index.html

 

[Layback Bear]

This might be of some interest. Lots of great pictures and information.

HubbleSite - Out of the ordinary...out of this world.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

This might be of some interest. Lots of great pictures and information.

HubbleSite - Out of the ordinary...out of this world.

Oh yes I do like the wallpapers Bear!! What a nice site am sticking this one in favourites.

 

[Golden]

Phobos passing in front of the Sun, as seen from Mars Curiosity

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/wwfuture/960_540/images/live/p0/1f/wm/p01fwm08.jpg

 

[A Guy]

Life found in the sediments of an Antarctic subglacial lake for the first time

dence of diverse life forms dating back nearly a hundred thousand years has been found in subglacial lake sediments by a group of British scientists. The possibility that extreme life forms might exist in the cold and dark lakes hidden kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice sheet has fascinated scientists for decades.

However, direct sampling of these lakes in the interior of Antarctica continues to present major technological challenges. Recognising this, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and the Universities of Northumbria and Edinburgh have been searching around the retreating margins of the ice sheet for subglacial lakes that are becoming exposed for the first time since they were buried more than 100,000 years ago.

Source

A Guy