Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts (3117)

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Saturn Opposition...

Image Source: Link below

On May 10, at 2 p.m. EDT, Saturn reaches opposition — the point in its orbit when it lies opposite the Sun as seen from Earth. The planet then appears as a bright yellowish object at magnitude 0.1 in the constellation Libra the Scales. In the Northern Hemisphere, that star pattern rises in the southeast at sunset.



As you might guess, opposition means the planet rises at sunset, climbs highest in the south around 1 A.M. local daylight time, and sets as the Sun comes up. Opposition also brings Saturn closest to Earth, so it shines brightest for the year (at magnitude 0.1). During times of good seeing (atmospheric steadiness), an observer can pick out the more prominent features of the globe and rings through a 3-inch telescope.



There’s no rush to do this. An apparition (observing season) of Saturn spans a bit more than 10 months. The current one began in late November 2013 when Saturn emerged from the solar glare in the morning sky. The planet will remain visible until October, when it will sink too low in the west after sunset for useful observations.



Astronomy: Saturn shines brightest in May, Michael E. Bakich

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Mother's Day (re post and add)...

Image Credit: IndieRockCafe.com

An anniversary, of sorts...

History of Mother's Day



"The first official Mother's Day celebrations in the United States took place in West Virginia in 1908, at the urging of Anna Jarvis. Anna's mother (also named Anna), who was active in her community, frequently organized women's groups to promote friendship and health. It had been her dream to reunite families divided by the Civil War with a day dedicated to mothers. When she passed away on May 12, 1907, Anna held a memorial service at her late mother's church in her honor. Her mother's idea of Mother's Day quickly caught on, and within five years of her death, virtually every state was observing the day on the anniversary of her death. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday of May as the official Mother's Day.



"You can do anything you want to do, if you set your MIND to it. You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you." Mildred D. Goodwin, sunrise 15 September 1925, sunset 7 May 2009, laid to rest 12 May 2009.



Despite my challenging background, she said this often, and believed the quote I reproduced above, and more importantly: she (my MVP) believed in me. I am ever grateful that even as the light was fading from your eyes, you knew who your children - my sister and I - were.



Mildred: Her name means "gentle strength." She was that. Her name for me was "stink": diapers. You understand.



Please honor your mother (while she lives), who assists you in fulfilling your dreams: http://www.e-cards.com/area/mothers-day/ (also source of "history of Mother's Day" above)
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Nuclear Fusion With Hammers...


Michel Laberge’s favorite type of energy is the nuclear energy. And the reason for that, as Laberge discusses in this recent TED talk, is that it is the energy of the future. Today nuclear energy generates close to 20% of electricity in the US, but that is, of course, done through nuclear fission. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, is thefuture of nuclear power, however generating energy in such a way is a gargantuan task for the engineers. There are many potential ways of harnessing the power of the atom and Michel Laberge offers a rather interesting one. High speeds, scorching temperatures and crushing pressure produced by synchronized hammers is the key of Laberge’s idea.



Source: PhysicsDatabase.com

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Loop Quantum Cosmology...


This classic video discusses the rapidly growing field of loop quantum gravity or, more generally, loop cosmology. The main idea behind loop quantum gravity is that space-time is granular and that such granularity is a consequence of quantum mechanics. The powerful implication of this, if, of course, the theory turns our to be correct, is that quantum theory and general relativity can be joined together in what is usually called quantum gravity. Such a powerful junction of the two fields would enable cosmologists to answer some fundamental and almost esoteric questions, for instance, what was the nature of the big bang and what caused it. This video introduces the main ideas of the field and the leading experts, including their interviews.



Source: PhysicsDatabase.com

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Expanding the Alphabet...

Image source: Huffington Post Science

For billions of years, the history of life has been written with just four letters — A, T, C and G, the labels given to the DNA subunits contained in all organisms. That alphabet has just grown longer, researchers announce, with the creation of a living cell that has two 'foreign' DNA building blocks in its genome.



Hailed as a breakthrough by other scientists, the work is a step towards the synthesis of cells able to churn out drugs and other useful molecules. It also raises the possibility that cells could one day be engineered without any of the four DNA bases used by all organisms on Earth.



“What we have now is a living cell that literally stores increased genetic information,” says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who led the 15-year effort. Their research appears online today in Nature.



Nature: A semi-synthetic organism with an expanded genetic alphabet
Denis A. Malyshev, Kirandeep Dhami, Thomas Lavergne, Tingjian Chen, Nan Dai, Jeremy M. Foster, Ivan R. Corrêa & Floyd E. Romesberg
Nature: First life with 'alien' DNA
#P4TC:
DNA Codex
Google Mapping Human Genome
Book of Life

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El Niño...

Source: NOAA's El Niño Page

The El Niño / La Niña climate pattern that alternately warms and cools the eastern tropical Pacific is the 800-pound gorilla of Earth’s climate system. On a global scale, no other single phenomenon has a greater influence on whether a year will be warmer, cooler, wetter, or drier than average. Naturally, then, the ears of seasonal forecasters and natural resource managers around the world perked up back in early March when NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued an “El Niño Watch.”



The “watch” means that oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean are favorable for the development of El Niño within the next six months. These maps reveal one of the most significant of those favorable signs: a deep pool of warm water sliding eastward along the equator since late January.



As the warm surface water is pushed westward by the prevailing winds, cool water from deeper in the ocean rises to the surface near South America. This temperature gradient—warm waters around Indonesia and cooler waters off South America—lasts only as long as the easterly winds are blowing.



If those winds go slack or reverse direction in the western Pacific, the warm pool of water around Indonesia is released and begins a slow slosh back toward South America. The slosh is called a Kelvin wave. If the Kelvin wave has a strong impact on the surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific, then it can help change the atmospheric circulation and trigger a cascade of climatic side effects that reverberate across the globe.



Climate.gov: Slow slosh of warm water across Pacific hints El Niño is brewing
Huffington Post: Climate Change Is Already Here

NOAA's El Niño Page

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Ununseptium...

Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories

The official Periodic Table of the Elements is one step closer to adding element 117 to its ranks. That’s thanks to an international team of scientists that was able to successfully create several atoms of element 117, which is currently known as Ununseptium until it’s given an official name.



The paper for this experiment has been published in Physical Review Letters.



Ununseptium, like many superheavy elements near the end of the periodic table, is incredibly unstable, existing only for fractions of a second before decaying into other elements. In fact, scientists didn’t actually observe any atoms of element 117 – its existence was confirmed by its decay. Indeed, the elements that 117 decays to themselves decay.



As part of the Periodic Table, Ununseptium would be considered a Group VII element, putting it in the same family as flourine, bromine and chlorine.



Forbes: Scientists Confirm The Existence Of Element 117, Alex Knapp
Phys.org: Superheavy element 117 confirmed
Radio Chemistry: Element 117, Ununseptium

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Battle of Puebla - Wikipedia

Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for "fifth of May") is a celebration held on May 5. It is celebrated nationwide in the United States and regionally in Mexico, primarily in the state of Puebla, where the holiday is called El Dia de la Batalla de Puebla (English: The Day of the Battle of Puebla). The date is observed in the United States as a celebration of Mexican heritage and pride, and to commemorate the cause of freedom and democracy during the first years of the American Civil War. In the state of Puebla, the date is observed to commemorate the Mexican army's unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín. Contrary to widespread popular belief, Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico's Independence Day—the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico—which is actually celebrated on September 16. (Wikipedia)



The National Society of Hispanic Physicists has a recognition page of Hispanic Americans in Physics - Past, Present and Future. Similar to what I posted during the month of February, my intention is to give the same attention to Hispanic Scientists and Engineers during the celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month.
Teaching for Change: Book link here


Almost 10 years before "Brown vs. Board of Education," Sylvia Mendez and her parents helped end school segregation in California. An American citizen of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage who spoke and wrote perfect English, Mendez was denied enrollment to a "Whites only" school. Her parents took action by organizing the Hispanic community and filing a lawsuit in federal district court. Their success eventually brought an end to the era of segregated education in California.


Praise for "Separate is Never Equal" by Duncan Tonatiuh
STARRED REVIEWS

"Tonatiuh masterfully combines text and folk-inspired art to add an important piece to the mosaic of U.S. civil rights history."
--"Kirkus Reviews," starred review
"Younger children will be outraged by the injustice of the Mendez family story but pleased by its successful resolution. Older children will understand the importance of the 1947 ruling that desegregated California schools, paving the way for Brown v. Board of Education seven years later."
--"School Library Journal," starred review
"Tonatiuh ("Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote") offers an illuminating account of a family's hard-fought legal battle to desegregate California schools in the years before "Brown" v. "Board of Education.""
--"Publishers Weekly"
"Pura Belpre Award-winning Tonatiuh makes excellent use of picture-book storytelling to bring attention to the 1947 California ruling against public-school segregation."
--"Booklist"



Happy Cinco de Mayo!
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Tyranny of Authoritarians...

Image Source: The Graveyard Site

This was inspired by my read of the old COSMOS on my kindle. I happened upon this letter excerpt from Galileo to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615. Given the unbelievable, relentless assaults on the new show by Young Earth/Universe Creationists, Galileo might as well have been writing this letter in the 21st Century:



To the Most Serene Grand Duchess Mother:



Some years ago, as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors-as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution or destruction.

.

.

.

Now as to the false aspersions which they so unjustly seek to cast upon me, I have thought it necessary to justify myself in the eyes of all men, whose judgment in matters of` religion and of reputation I must hold in great esteem. I shall therefore discourse of the particulars which these men produce to make this opinion detested and to have it condemned not merely as false but as heretical. To this end they make a shield of their hypocritical zeal for religion. They go about invoking the Bible, which they would have minister to their deceitful purposes. Contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers, if I am not mistaken, they would extend such authorities until even m purely physical matters - where faith is not involved - they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense.



That's aspersions...without asparagus!



Fordham University
 Galileo Galilei: Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, 1615

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Pseudo Gap Superconductors...

Argonne National Laboratory

Thanks to a new study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, researchers have identified and solved at least one paradox in the behavior of high-temperature superconductors. The riddle involves a phenomenon called the “pseudogap,” a region of energy levels in which relatively few electrons are allowed to exist.



Despite their name, high-temperature superconductors are actually quite cold – roughly 250 degrees to 350 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Conventional superconductors, like those used in MRI machines or particle accelerators, are even colder. Even though they are still quite cold, high-temperature superconductors are of special interest to researchers because, at least in theory, they are much easier to keep sufficiently cold and are thus potentially more useful.



Argonne National Laboratory:
Scientists gain new insight into mysterious electronic phenomenon

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A Plane That Drives...

Source: Link below

Flying cars have long been the stuff of science fiction, though plenty of entrepreneurs and visionaries have struggled to make the concept a reality – including no less than the original Henry Ford.



The group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni that developed the Transition flying car have said they’re ready to take a giant leap even farther into the wild blue yonder. They’ve announced a more advanced concept, the TF-X, that is rapidly working its way toward reality.



To start with, the four-seater would be capable of vertical take-offs and landings. And since it would largely be controlled by a central computer network, the TF-X would, claims a Terrafugia promotional video, require a pilot/driver to have as little as five hours of training, a slight fraction of what it now takes to get the most basic private pilot’s license.



Oh, and if that isn’t appealing enough, the team says their newest flying car design would use an environmentally friendly plug-in hybrid powertrain.

NBC News: Flying Car Moves from Science Fiction Toward Reality,
Paul A. Eisenstein
#P4TC: From Fantasy, To Reality (2011)
Site: Terrafugia.com

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Team Tesseract...

Source: Museum of Flight

Orion is the first spacecraft designed to transport astronauts as far as Mars. NASA plans to launch the first Orion test flight later this year. Longer distance space flight poses a number of design challenges.



“In deep space the challenges are zero gravity and a radiation environment. So bone loss, muscle loss and the radiation as you don’t have the atmosphere of the Earth to protect you,” said Laurence Price Deputy Program Manager at Lockheed Martin.



Price is talking about the Van Allen Belt, a tightly packed field of radiation around the earth that acts as a layer that protects earth from charged ions. NASA has to study this area of radiation before they can send a manned spaceflight through it, and possibly on to Mars sometime after 2020.



The test flight will allow NASA to, among other things, experiment with different approaches to shielding radiation.



To come up with a radiation shield, Lockheed Martin, NASA and the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) created the Orion spacecraft Exploration Design Challenge for high school students. “So the idea behind the challenge is to get the students interested in something that is very necessary and we need to make a lot of progress in it… the students put a proposal together and build an experiment to measure the different approaches to radiation shielding,” said Price.



Student teams from around the country participated in the competition.



While at the USA Science and Engineering Festival last week, the winning design was announced by Team ARES from the Governor’s School for Science and Technology in Hampton, VA.



The American Radiation Eradication in Space (ARES) team created a 7” cubic shield called the Tesseract. It will house and protect a dosimeter from radiation while in flight. The final incarnation will be made of Tantalum, Tin, Zirconium, Aluminum, and Polyethylene. The heavy metals will block gamma rays while ions and neutrons are captured by the hydrocarbons of the polyethylene. The students selected their materials based on cost, malleability, machinability, weight, and abundance. Thanks to CAD models, the design was made to have flanges and bolts which allow the Tesseract to be strong, easily produced, and opened.



Engineering.com:
Orion Spacecraft will carry Radiation Shield designed by High School Students

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Supersymmetry...

The best hope for discovering evidence of supersymmetry will come from the Large Hadron Collider, which is currently shut down so that it can be upgraded.
Credit: Thinkstock

The first run of the LHC, which ended in early 2013, produced enough data to allow researchers to identify the long-sought Higgs boson. During the shutdown, scientists and engineers will make improvements to the machine, which will let it reach the highest energies that it was designed for.



Caveat to the link below: crisis in this case for a science publication I'd take to mean "conundrum," which is a good way to sell print copy. When I think of a crisis, I recall the "Black Hole War" between Leo Susskind and Stephen Hawking (a very good read, I might add). However, if you're a string theorist, SUSY or lack thereof can get you a little agitated  I plan to purchase at the local supermarket to have an off-line physical copy.


Scientific American: Supersymmetry and the Crisis in Physics
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Diamond Teleportation...

The ability to teleport quantum information between diamond crystals that can also store it is a small but important step toward a quantum Internet.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The prospect of a quantum Internet has excited physicists for two decades. A quantum Internet will allow the transmission of information around the world with perfect security and make cloud-based quantum computing a reality.



But first, physicists must perfect the technology of quantum routing—the ability to receive and transmit quantum information without destroying it.



That’s a significant challenge. The key is a technique called quantum teleportation, which transmits information from one point to another without it passing through the space in between. This is a routine operation in any decent quantum optics lab but quantum routing—which concatenates the process—is another challenge altogether.



Today, Wolfgang Pfaff at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Delft in the Netherlands and a few pals say they’ve take a significant step toward this goal with the first demonstration of diamond teleporters that can act as nodes in a quantum network. “These results establish diamond spin qubits as a prime candidate for the realization of quantum networks for quantum communication and network-based quantum computing,” they say.



The fundamental difficulty in quantum routing is that quantum information is fragile stuff. So quantum teleportation has always involved creating a qubit, teleporting it and then immediately measuring it to check whether teleportation has been successful.



However, the process of measurement destroys quantum information. So an important goal is to create routers that can read and write quantum information without destroying it.


Physics arXiv:
Unconditional quantum teleportation between distant solid-state qubits
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Nano Explosives and Dark Matter...

Particles of dark matter should trigger nanoexplosions in certain materials, an idea that could lead to an entirely new generation of detectors, say physicists.

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: One of the great mysteries of modern astrophysics is the nature of dark matter. This is the mysterious stuff that astrophysicists say must exist to provide the gravitational forces necessary to hold galaxies together.



The general consensus is that there is around five times as much dark matter as visible matter in the universe. And this raises obvious questions: what is this stuff and how can we detect it?



These questions have triggered an almighty race among physicists to detect dark matter and measure its characteristics. But the results of their experiments are puzzling and contradictory. Some labs are claiming to have detected the stuff while others appear to rule out the possibility.



What’s needed, of course, is more data from a greater variety of detectors. And today, Alejandro Lopez-Suarez at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and a few pals propose a novel idea. They hope to detect dark matter by the effect it has on explosives.



Their plan is to create small explosive particles that are sensitive enough to detonate when hit by a lump of dark matter. Having done this, the physicists then sit back and wait for the ensuing fireworks.


Physics arXiv: New Dark Matter Detector using Nanoscale Explosives
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This Dandelion...



I discussed in two parts last weekend the pervasiveness of pseudoscience in our culture that in many ways have led to the standoff in Nevada, the shooting at the Jewish Community Center; the curt comments from Bill O'Reilly and now the (alleged) nonplussed commentary on being seen in public with African Americans from LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling to his obviously-young-enough-to-be-his-daughter non-European girlfriend. His famous employee Chris Paul is apparently waiting for confirmation of this rumor, but I seriously doubt there will be a strike, forfeit or walk-off. I think his pending NAACP Image Award has probably been revoked.



Eugenics is an example of the science of evolution being pushed into the realm of pseudoscience: part of Darwin's thesis was comparing artificial selection - breeding - to natural selection, which only requires an inordinate amount of time. (Thus the Jesuit estimate of 6000 years must be adhered to versus the scientific, painstaking calculation by Clair C. Patterson of 4.6 billion years.) No less than Charles Murray has crawled out from under his rock to advise Texas gubernatorial candidate Gregg Abbott how do deal with the GOP's "women problem," and Nobel Prize recipient William Shockley (of the Shockley diode equation) donated his spunk to the cause of selectively breeding geniuses. It has been my experience that academic preparation - even at the highest levels - does not always confer critical thinking skills or wisdom.



My favorite hedge-fund rancher Cliven Bundy is not a welfare queen: that would be a sexist and racist comparison to gaming the system. At 1.2 million dollars in 21 years of free grazing on "we the people," this is outright theft from taxpayers, a slow-mo version of the Wall Street staccato bank heist of 2008 (for which, they paid themselves all handsome bonuses), because of, you know: "liberty."



Taraxacum /təˈræksəkʉm/ is a large genus of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae. They are native to Eurasia and North and South America, and two species, T. officinaleand T. erythrospermum, are found as weeds worldwide.[2] Both species are edible in their entirety.[3] The common name dandelion (/ˈdændɨlaɪ.ən/ DAN-di-ly-ən, from French dent-de-lion, meaning "lion's tooth") is given to members of the genus, and like other members of the Asteraceae family, they have very small flowers collected together into a composite flower head. Each single flower in a head is called a floret. Many Taraxacum species produce seeds asexually by apomixis, where the seeds are produced without pollination, resulting in offspring that are genetically identical to the parent plant.[4] (Wikipedia)



This dandelion is blown in the wind by echo chambers deficit of facts and bereft of values other than profit in the deified "market." It looks innocent enough until it implants in the rich manure of sectarian strife at the pariah 99% levels, fed by ignorance; metastasizes and grows into the weed of violence. As long as we argue the conspiracy theory of the moment and treat other parts of humanity as "the other"; we cannot and will not see the "invisible hand of the market" deftly picking our pockets. The "patriots" are pointing in the wrong direction.



Hosea 8:7 "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up."
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Gliding Atoms...

The micrograph on the left shows a tiny triangle of metallic molybdenite (labelled 1T) that measures just 3 nm at its base. It has been created within a semiconductor sheet (2H) of the same material. The diagram on the right shows the position of the triangle. Such structures can function as quantum dots. (Courtesy: Kazu Suenaga)

Researchers in Japan say they have watched individual atoms rearrange themselves during the semiconductor-to-metal phase transition in molybdenite (MoS2) – a graphene-like material that can occur in sheets just one molecule thick. Until now, such phase transitions were thought of as collective motions of atoms, but the new observations show that atom-by-atom movements are at play. The result could provide important information to researchers trying to create electronic devices from single sheets of MoS2.



Molybdenite is a direct bandgap 2D semiconductor that shows some promise for use in electronics and optoelectronics devices. The mobility of its electric charge carriers is greater than 100 cm2/Vs (and could be as high as 500 cm2/Vs) – values that compare well to silicon. It is a "van der Waals solid", which means that it comprises robust 2D sheets weakly bonded to each other to form a layered 3D structure much like graphite. This means that molybdenite is stable on a variety of substrates – even transparent or plastic ones. Single-layer molybdenite is only about 0.65 nm thick, which means that it can be used to create very thin transistors.



An important property of molybdenite is polymorphism: it has different electronic characteristics depending on the crystal structure of the layers. It is a semiconductor when the sulphur and molybdenum are arranged in a trigonal prismatic structure and it is a metal when the atoms assume an octahedral structure. Both structural phases can be thought of as a central plane of molybdenum atoms sandwiched between two planes of sulphur atoms. Phase transitions were believed to occur when the planes glided over each other – but such a transformation had never been directly observed in an experiment until now.



Physics World: Ultrathin material glides from metal to semiconductor

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B612...

Credit: Link below

Why science/math matters...

A new and surprising rate at which an asteroid collides with Earth has been calculated by the B612 Foundation—a private group dedicated to defending the Earth against such catastrophes.



In spite of lower estimations calculated by other scientists, the B612 Foundation has collected data suggesting that the Earth is capable of being hit by an asteroid once a century, a rate previously thought to be once every 3,000 years. Physicist and former space shuttle astronaut Ed Lu, who is CEO of B612, explains what his data shows.



“There are people who say, ‘Oh, once every million years we have something we have to worry about.’ That couldn’t be more wrong,” says Lu.



“Eventually you’re going to get hit, because it’s just a matter of time,” he adds.



Evidence which supports this prediction was collected and made accessible by Peter Brown of the University of Western Ontario. The data gathered was administered by a network of sensors that detect nuclear explosions. Picking up sound waves, the sensors have detected 26 asteroid explosions since 2001. Some of these collisions occurred during 2009 and 2013, one off the coast of Indonesia and the other over Russia, respectively.

The Space Reporter:
Deadly asteroids occur more often than previously thought, Rachelle Flick
Snag Films: Asteroids - Deadly Impact

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Ring of Fire...

The Moon’s orbit about the Earth is not perfectly circular, so that at different times the Moon can be slightly closer or further away than usual. This composite shot shows the progress of an annular eclipse in May 2013.
Credit: Jia Hao | The National Maritime Museum | Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013

The sun will look like a ring of fire above some remote parts of the world next Tuesday (April 29) during a solar eclipse, but most people around the world won't get a chance to see it.



Whereas lunar eclipses occur only when there's a full moon, and solar eclipses only happen during a new moon. Half the world saw a lunar eclipse during the full moon on April 15. When a lunar eclipse occurs, it usually means there is also a solar eclipse at the preceding or following new moon.



Tuesday's solar eclipse is known as an "annular" — rather than "total" — lunar eclipse. That’s because Tuesday's eclipse will occur when the moon is close to its farthest distance from the Earth, making it too small to cover the sun completely. The resulting effect looks like a ring of fire, called an “annulus,” appears around the silhouette of the moon. ['Ring of Fire' Annular Solar Eclipse of April 29, 2014 (Visibility Maps)]



But most people won't see the whole eclipse. The only place in the world where this annular eclipse will be visible is a small area in Antarctica. However, partial phases of the eclipse will be visible in other places. Most of those areas are in the ocean — rarely traveled ocean, in fact — but the entire continent of Australia will get a good view.



Space.com: Solar Eclipse Will Transform Sun into 'Ring of Fire' Next Week, Geoff Gaherty

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Internet of Things...

With the advent of the Internet of things, potentially billions of devices will report data about themselves, making it possible to create new applications in areas as diverse as factory optimization, car maintenance, or simply keeping track of your stuff online. But doing this today requires at least some degree of programming knowledge. Now Bug Labs, a New York City company, is trying to make it as easy to create an Internet of things application as it is to put a file into Dropbox.
Source: Solid State Technology



With a new service called Freeboard, Bug Labs is giving people a simple one-click way to publish data from a “thing” to its own Web page (Bug Labs calls this “dweeting”). To get a sense of this, visit Dweet.io with your computer or mobile phone, click “try it now,” and you’ll see raw data from your device itself: its GPS coordinates and even the position of your computer mouse. The data is now on a public Web page and available for analysis and aggregation; another click stops this sharing.
Satlz TPM



Freeboard, expected to be launched Tuesday, makes sense of such streams of data. A few more clicks create quick graphical displays of the shared information, such as location, temperature, motor speed, or simply whether a device is on or off. “We are trying to make the Internet of things far simpler, and far more accessible, to anybody,” says Peter Semmelhack, CEO of Bug Labs, a business that initially focused on the development of open-source modular hardware (see “Bug Labs Adds New Modules”), but which now develops software platforms.
Ibid



MIT Technology Review: A Dropbox for the Internet of Things, David Talbot

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