Distance on Flickr.
There are many roads in Iceland that seem to run on forever until they hit a massive mountain in the distance.
Shooting Lasers to Make Fake Stars
A night of lasers and unit telescopes at Paranal Observatory, south of Antofagasta, Chile, and operated by the European Southern Observatory. The folks over at the Paranal Observatory shoot these lasers into the night sky in order to form a light spot. As mentioned by AtacamaPhotos “The spot serves as an artificial guide star to analyze atmospheric turbulences which are then corrected with the Adaptive Optics System.”. The images above was captured by — David Jones
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is a telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.
The VLT consists of four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2m across, which are generally used separately but can be used together to achieve very high angular resolution. [**]
The Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve in New Zealand has a new sign to greet visitors! You can also see the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy visible to the naked eye in the southern hemisphere.
via International Dark-Sky Association; photo credit: Maki Yanagimachi
Jellyfish surge in Mediterranean threatens environment – and tourists: A project is tracking the phenomenon as global warming and overfishing boost numbers of the venomous sea creature @ Guardian
via saveplanetearth
My word! We’ve passed 100 science tie fans already. Thanks tumblr!
Download Your Memories; Retrieve Them Later
Could human memories be uploaded and stored — just like data — in a computer? Scientists say not now, but in the coming decades it’s likely we’ll be able to store our memories in a way that allows us to retrieve them later. Long the stuff of science fiction novels, this kind of merger between computer technology and the human brain is being pushed by new findings in neuroscience, as well as advances in computer science and artificial intelligence.
Two new high-profile scientific projects are also giving impetus to this idea. President Obama announced a $1 billion effort in February to map the brain, while the European Union announced it would fund a $1.3 billion effort to build a human brain in a silicon substrate. But before anything so ambitious as uploading ourselves to a computer is possible, neuroscientists say they have to figure how and where our memories exist.
Quantum Entanglement Common In Large Systems?
A property of the universe so strange that our man himself, Einstein, called it “…spooky action at a distance…”. In an entangled system, two particles e.g. photos will interact and then be separated with exactly the same quantum state; that is to say, same momentum, spin etc. and then if one particle is affected, say its spin reversed, the same will be observed for the other particle. This in itself is strange enough, but it gets weirder. Even when separated by a distance, be it 1 km or 1 trillion, the two particles will change at exactly the same time; the transfer of state is instantaneous. Yet, get this; new research conducted by three researchers at Case Western Reserve University have shown that this property of entangled matter is common in larger systems.
The mathematicians didn’t set out to explain how quantum entanglement works, but rather to find the threshold at which it becomes a common property. By connecting quantum mechanics and some very high level maths developed in the last five decades they were able to show that in a system of a random state, if we were to separate it into more than five subsystems, you would not observe two entangled states; however if you took the system and split it into five or less states, you would likely find two subsystems which were entangled. For example in a system of 1000 particles, two subsystems of less than 200 particles would not likely be entangled, but two subsystems larger than 200 typically will. The change around the threshold of 200 is substantial. The calculations they conducted were very precise and drew on of areas of mathematics which had previously only been developed for aesthetical reasons, but have now found a use in the real world.
The lead mathematician, Stanislaw Szarek, will be attending a semester long program at Cambridge in order to continue this investigation into this strange development.
This fantastically strange find has shown the world that there is promise in the new area of study, quantum information science and that one day we may be able to use this science to create hack-proof encryptions and computers so fast they make our best supercomputers look like adding machines from the 1800s. (x)
Things that make life worth living → Our Galaxy
Some of these are edited way over the top. I can see some slight editing to make the view more visible but that’s just about all I can rationalize. And it’s not just this set, I see overly edited astronomy pictures much to often. Seriously if you can’t see the beauty in the Milky Way and feel the need to edit it you’ve got a problem. And I feel as for you.
22-Year-Old Nigerian Student Breaks GPA Record at Johns Hopkins University
Emmanuel Ohuabunwa not only graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in neuroscience, but he did so with a 3.98 GPA. Congrats to Mr. Ohuabunwa on this phenomenal achievement!h/t code red
black excellence
