Perseid Meteor impact, that or the empire has found the rebel base!
Credit Photographer Petr Horálek
Hypersonic atmospheric reentry causes the compression of gasses in front of the object rapidly heating them up. This is why instead of slowly burning away it appears the meteor hits a wall or space shield. (Compression (and not friction) causing the majority of reentry heat is also why reentry vehicles are pretty blunt allowing for the compression to take place as far in front as possible, leaving a decompressing and thus cooler skin of air around most of the vehicle.) The gas after the the explosion is called a 'persistent train' and is thought to be ionized atmospheric gas slowly recombining with electrons and can persist for quite awhile after the meteor is gone. The vortex ring could have been created by a couple different means, but it mostly means the altitude where the meteor vaporized had pretty calm airflow in comparison to the meteor and atmospheric gasses that it turned to plasma.
The image of a big hairy humanoid hiding in the wilderness appears not just in movies like “Harry and the Hendersons” and the animated film “Smallfoot,” which premieres on Friday, but also in cultures all over the world. Visitors to the mountains of the Chinese province of Hubei report sightings of the Yeren, or “wild man,” who dwells in the forest. In Cameroon, the fearsome Dodu is said to dine on grubs. The Mapinguari stalks the rainforests of Brazil and Bolivia; the Yowie walks about the Australian outback. In Russia’s Sakha Republic, it’s the Chuchunya, and in the Caucasus and Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, it’s the Almas.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
One of the big questions in particle physics is why is gravity so immensely more weak than all the other forces. So so much weaker, like a gajillion jillion jillion times weaker than any of the other forces. One hypothesis was that gravity wasn't actually that much weaker and that if instead it had the property to leak into another dimension and really exist in 4 or more dimensions of space that its affect on the 3 dimensions we exist in would be much weaker so as to give it the appearance of being so weak.
Since the discovery of gravitational waves our ability to study gravity has increased and a recent, to us, neutron star collision in another galaxy allowed for both the light and the gravity to be detected from the collision at the same time. Astronomers used the energy of the collision based on the understanding of the light produced to calculate the energy expected this far away depending on a 3 dimensional or 4 dimensional gravitational wave. Turns out the expected energy matched very well with 3 dimensions suggesting that gravity isn't leaking over into a 4th dimension after all. At least over distances of 100 million light years gravity is a 3 dimensional force.
After lementing finding so many exterminator sites when trying to identify a new spider on my balcony, a friend mentioned the iNaturalist app.
It's a rather cool app that is designed to crowdsource species data, location and movements. The idea is you sign up and can either browse observed species in different areas marked on a map or upload your own images which can be identified by others. I've learned the names of multiple plants in my area and plan to upload species sightings when I get a chance.
So a care package from my mom to my sister in the next city, I'm sending it, I pop it open to pack it better.
Sizes of objects as they actually turned out seemed on average larger, except the cell phone wrist watches. Porn and aging eyes probably dictates screen size. Some of it was pretty close. Except the 2020 Lunar Olympics.
Mostly kid friendly up to the 70s history of space flight with some futurism.
Handing these with pride off to my niece and nephew.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
I've probably explained this before, but I thought this was a great example of how a spider web works.
The green is a dry powdered paint that I blew onto the webbing. You can see that it stuck mostly to the spiral webbing and barely if at all to the radial web and the center web. The radial webbing is what the spider runs along and the center is where it sits to detect the location of the captured prey. The spider will keep a foot on the one radial spoke that has no spiral attached to detect vibrations, once something is detected it will run to the center where it will pluck the different radial strings to find the heavy one and home in on the captured prey, both the spokes and the center are left unsticky for fast movement. The patchwork in the center is said to be species specific and may be used by spiders to tell if they've wandered onto a potential mates web or might be a potential snack.
You can also see why a spider needs to remake it's web every so often as the sticky spiral webbing can stick to itself and become less useful as seen on the left where the blowing and weight of the powder caused multiple strands to stick together.
The newly hatched spiderlings were found to be entirely dependent on nutritious spider milk, containing nearly four times the protein of cow’s milk, secreted and fed to them by their mothers.
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The spider mothers continued to care for and feed their offspring for nearly 40 days, long after they were able to forage on their own and almost until the point of sexual maturity.
But on Mars the sky is orange ... and sunsets are blue:
Of course human eyes have not yet been delivered to Mars to report what colours actually appear. The orange colour is due to dust - when (rarely) there's no dust, it's dark blue to black. The blue glow around the sun is less clear, something to do with how the dust scatters shorter vs longer wavelengths differently.
It's just under 3m long. From 1:32 to 2:20, the images are projected so the stars are fixed (even that bright one close to us, in this short 24h timescale), and the earth rotates (as it does). It's pretty neat.
Someday soon I think humans are going to need to accept that we aren't all that special after all and many things we think of that 'make us human' are really things that makes us alive, but exist in other animals.
The mirror test has always felt quite questionable as often it's scientists taking animals into strange settings, expecting them to act in a certain way (pawwing at a mark on their body seen in the mirror at the very moment as if the mark causes them concern) and then asking the scientists to judge whether or not they believe the animal acted in a way that means they have self awareness. There's just too many guesses at actions going on here to assume much of anything. With the rise of internet animal videos, I've seen more than a couple animals accidentally pass the mirror test while being dumb or cute in some other unrelated way, which has made me wonder if doing things like strapping monkey's heads down so they can't look away or other strange lab environments is one of the reasons animals are failing.
I would go so far as to argue that many types of self awareness are the default mode of things and the real advancement is understanding that others are self aware as well. Once we stop thinking of animals are automatons put here by god and instead similar neural networks that got here through evolution, it would seem silly for a self contained advanced neural network designed for preservation and procreation *not* to be self aware of its existence as an individual entity.
It always trips me out how late Oxygen was discovered. Like, "they" (alchemists?) must have known that there was something we need to breathe, and something we need for combustion, even if they didn't figure out they were the same thing.
What does it mean for an element to be "discovered"? Is that they time when we decide its definitely an element and not a molecule? I'm asking in the context of this animation, but also in general, as I have seen similar figures before. And I'm like, really? Isaac Fucking Newton didn't know about Oxygen? Inconceivable.
Re: Drive by science
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