A group of researchers recently observed a mysterious infrared emission coming from near a pulsar in NASA's Hubble Space telescope data. This animation depicts one possible source of the emission: a "fallback disk" or a disk that formed from materials of the parent star falling back into the neutron star after a supernova. Credit: ESA/N. Tr’Ehnl (Pennsylvania State University)/NASA
Space is filled with bizarre signals that we scramble to put meaning to — and now, researchers have detected yet another mysterious signal. This one emanated from near a neutron star, and for the first time, it's infrared.
So, what's nearby that could have created the weird signal? Scientists have a few ideas.
When a star reaches the end of its life, it typically undergoes a supernova explosion— the star collapses, and if it has enough mass, it will form a black hole. But if the star isn't massive enough, it will form a neutron star. [Supernova Photos: Great Images of Star Explosions]
Neutrons stars are very dense and, as their name suggests, are made up mostly of closely packed neutrons. Neutron stars can also be called "pulsars" if they are highly magnetized and rotate rapidly enough to emit electromagnetic waves, according to Space.com.
Typically, neutron stars emit radio waves or higher-energy waves such as X-rays, according a statement released by NASA yesterday (Sept. 17). But an international group of researchers from Penn State, the University of Arizona and Sabanci University in Turkey observed something interesting in NASA's Hubble Space Telescope data: a long signal of infrared light emitted near a neutron star, the researchers reported yesterday in The Astrophysical Journal.
This signal, they found, was about 800 light-years away and was "extended," meaning it was spread across a large stretch of space, unlike typical "point" signals from neutron stars that emit X-rays. Specifically, the signal stretched across 200 astronomical units (AU) of space, or 2.5 times the orbit of Pluto around the sun, according to a statement from Penn State. (One AU is the average distance from Earth to the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.)
Posted by Turtel Onli on September 19, 2018 at 8:30am
During the heady days of the Black Cultural revolution in Chicago, there was a lot of art dealing with this hope and concept. The mainstream galleries, Black art curators, historians and critics mostly stayed away from it. Then once certain major players in this died in came the White parasites. One a college professor the other a Jewish art dealer. Both swooped in making deals to sell works, with the other building a entire career path for herself. Now they are the accepted go-to authorities of this movement. That they treat as a dead slave on their plantations. "The Black Art Movement" now produces no revenue or power for the people it were supposed to benefit.
And all of this happened due to the "Black on Black boycott" that allowed non-Blacks to walk in a take it to the bank. WHen Black do not support and endorse its own positives others come in later to reap its resources, power & wealth.
Sort of like Jazz, The Blues, Peanut Butter and Hip Hop.........
I plan to write about this and be sure, in my life time this will not happen to the growing Black Age of Comics Movement.
A new uncertainty principle holds that quantum objects can be at two temperatures at once, which is similar to the famous Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, in which a cat in a box with a radioactive element can be both alive and dead. Credit: Shutterstock
The famous thought experiment known as Schrödinger's cat implies that a cat in a box can be both dead and alive at the same time — a bizarre phenomenon that is a consequence of quantum mechanics.
Now, physicists at the University of Exeter in England have found that a similar state of limbo may exist for temperatures: Objects can be two temperatures at the same time at the quantum level. This weird quantum paradox is the first completely new quantum uncertainty relation to be formulated in decades.
Heisenberg's other principle
In 1927, German physicist Werner Heisenberg postulated that the more precisely you measure a quantum particle's position, the less precisely you can know its momentum, and vice versa — a rule that would become the now-famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]
The new quantum uncertainty, which states that the more precisely you know temperature, the less you can say about energy, and vice versa, has big implications for nanoscience, which studies incredibly tiny objects smaller than a nanometer. This principle will change how scientists measure the temperature of extremely small things such as quantum dots, small semiconductors or single cells, the researchers said in the new study, which was published in June in the journal Nature Communications.
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."Richard Feynman
When the researchers turn an external magnetic field in different directions (indicated with arrows), they change the orientation of the linear electron flow above the kagome (six-fold) magnet, as seen in these electron wave interference patterns on the surface of a topological quantum kagome magnet. Each pattern is created by a particular direction of the external magnetic field applied on the sample.Image by M. Z. Hasan, Jia-Xin Yin, Songtian Sonia Zhang, Princeton University
Topics: Modern Physics, Nanotechnology, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics
An international team of researchers led by Princeton physicist Zahid Hasan has discovered a quantum state of matter that can be “tuned” at will — and it’s 10 times more tuneable than existing theories can explain. This level of manipulability opens enormous possibilities for next-generation nanotechnologies and quantum computing.
“We found a new control knob for the quantum topological world,” said Hasan, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics. “We expect this is tip of the iceberg. There will be a new subfield of materials or physics grown out of this. … This would be a fantastic playground for nanoscale engineering.”
Hasan and his colleagues, whose research appears in the current issue of Nature, are calling their discovery a “novel” quantum state of matter because it is not explained by existing theories of material properties.
Hasan discusses the discovery with Yin and Zhang in his office in Jadwin Hall.Photo byNick Barberio, Office of Communications
Hasan’s interest in operating beyond the edges of known physics is what attracted Jia-Xin Yin, a postdoctoral research associate and one of three co-first-authors on the paper, to his lab. Other researchers had encouraged him to tackle one of the defined questions in modern physics, Yin said.
“But when I talked to Professor Hasan, he told me something very interesting,” Yin said. “He’s searching for new phases of matter. The question is undefined. What we need to do is search for the question rather than the answer.”
The classical phases of matter — solids, liquids and gases — arise from interactions between atoms or molecules. In a quantum phase of matter, the interactions take place between electrons, and are much more complex.
“This could indeed be evidence of a new quantum phase of matter — and that’s, for me, exciting,” said David Hsieh, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and a 2009 Ph.D. graduate of Princeton, who was not involved in this research. “They’ve given a few clues that something interesting may be going on, but a lot of follow-up work needs to be done, not to mention some theoretical backing to see what really is causing what they’re seeing.”
Hasan has been working in the groundbreaking subfield of topological materials, an area of condensed matter physics, where his team discovered topological quantum magnets a few years ago. In the current research, he and his colleagues “found a strange quantum effect on the new type of topological magnet that we can control at the quantum level,” Hasan said.
Topics: Civil Rights, Diversity, Existentialism, History, Human Rights
Republicans: Founded in 1854 by anti-slavery expansion activists and modernizers, the Republican Party quickly surpassed the Whig Party as the principal opposition to the Democratic Party. In 1860, it came to power with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. The party presided over the American Civil War and Reconstruction and was harried by internal factions and scandals toward the end of the 19th century. Today, the party supports a conservative platform (from an American political perspective), with further foundations in supply-side fiscal policies, and social conservatism. Merriam-Webster
Fascism: The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922–43); the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also Fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach. Oxford dictionary
Friday, the campaign manager flipped to help Special Prosecutor Mueller, and himself as the cost of defense was becoming prohibitive, and at 69, spending the "rest of his life" in prison will likely be a short duration.
Also Friday at the end of a week of the Woodward book and an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times, an anonymous woman's incident with the Supreme Court nominee was proffered by Senator Feinstein (D-California). The alleged victim's name was hidden at her request. Senator Grassley was determined to plow ahead with a nomination in committee on the 20th. The charges by an anonymous person was "baseless" unless she came forward.
So, his accuser, came forward. In her own words "Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation." We will see if Chairman Grassley will follow "the rule of law," give her a hearing before the senate committee vote. Senators Collins and Murkowski will have pressure on them if Kavenaugh goes before the full senate.
The Republican Party prior to the fall of Richard M. Nixon had made a Faustian compromise between my kindergarten and first grade year. They turned from their foundation in Civil Rights and prosecuting the Civil War for political expediency by pulling in the disaffected "Dixiecrats" disillusioned by the tilt that started with Harry Truman in the '48 Democratic convention towards expanding equal opportunity towards African Americans. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights and 1968 Fair Housing Acts were more than many could bear. They were wooed, then migrated en masse to the siren song of the "Southern Strategy" and Nixon's "law and order" platform (read: reestablishment of white supremacy). This would be slightly camouflaged by coded language, as Lee Atwater opined:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” Rick Perlstein, Exclusive: Lee Atwater's Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy, The Nation
The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan I did not agree with in my youth, but I did admire aspects of it as a lot of people did. If you read novels as I did and still do, Tom Clancy and "The Hunt for Red October" or Robert Ludlum's "Bourne Trilogy" held your rapt attention. That was back when you talked about novels at work near water coolers. That was post the Vietnam era, when the country spat on vets as "baby killers." In the wake of the Iranian hostage crisis, we wanted desperately to seem "tough" and in control. We recreated a new mythology for ourselves, and catharsis with characters like Sylvester Stallone bouncing between "Rocky" and "Rambo"; we all loved Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry."and through a brash machismo, we tried to rescue our bruised national self-image in a tough-talking, B-movie actor, who's "awe shucks shrug" persona masked an agenda infused with the Janus religions of Ayn Rand worship and libertarianism. This was also prior to the "Me Too" movement and acknowledging the lingering toxicity of misogyny. AIDS was becoming a health crisis in the LGBT community that Mr. Shucks would ignore as the bodies represented by memorial quilts piled up, and pop culture along with Hollywood had a keen focus on nostalgia.
Abstract
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood studios churned out film after film that sought to recapture, revise, and re-imagine the fifties, as evidenced by films like American Graffiti (1973), Grease (1977), The Outsiders (1983), Reckless (1983), Footloose (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Blue Velvet (1986), Stand By Me (1986), and Hairspray (1988). Academic and popular critics alike have noted the peculiar fascination Hollywood had for the fifties, comparing the politics of its fifties nostalgia to the rise of the neoconservative movement that took Ronald Reagan as its avatar.
However, it is important to recognize that representations of the fifties in Reagan Era films and popular culture were far from homogeneous. Rather than a concept with discrete political or social import, "the fifties" functioned in the Reagan Era as a set of unstable signifiers, the meanings of which were the subject of intense negotiation and struggle.
Dwyer, Michael D., "Back to the fifties: Pop nostalgia in the Reagan Era" (2010). English - Dissertations. 54.https://surface.syr.edu/eng_etd/54
*****
This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now
They don't know if they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan
They don't know if they want to be diplomats ...
Or continue the same policy of nuclear nightmare diplomacy
John Foster Dulles ain't nothing but the name of an airport now
The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia
They want to go back as far as they can ...
Even if it's only as far as last week
Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards
And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes
Riding to the rescue at the last possible moment
The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse ...
Or, the man who always came to save America at the last moment
Someone always came to save America at the last moment
This is a party, before its current avatar, that has always looked back longingly to the 1950s: when industry wasn't so global and a white male with a high school education (or less) could purchase a house and support a family. This of course was a time of segregated schools, transportation and neighborhoods by law prior to the nascent efficacy of the Civil Rights movement; an era of closeted LGBT people, who's existence I can only imagine was like constantly living in a suffocating envelope or cocoon; there weren't many Hispanic/Latino with exception of pockets in California and Texas, usually in agriculture and women - white women - were in the kitchen at home. Black women were too - mostly, but not completely as the servants of white women.
And now, they see a chance at a stolen Supreme Court seat to take us all back to those (not-so) Happy Days, a sexual assaulter appointed by a sexual assaulter to sit next to a sexual harasser to decide the future of women and their bodies, as well as people of color and LGBT and their Civil Rights. The desperation for those (not-so) Happy Days will have them lie, cheat, steal (2016 and past questionable late 20th century elections) and possibly collude with a foreign power to maintain Christian Supremacy sans White Supremacy that has had remarkable staying power.
Their "great again" has since the existential threatening presence of President Obama been quite literally by "any means necessary" (Malcolm X). We just didn't fathom how much power meant to them.
So, when do we stop calling them "republicans"?
Republicans: Founded in 1854 by anti-slavery expansion activists and modernizers, the Republican Party quickly surpassed the Whig Party as the principal opposition to the Democratic Party. In 1860, it came to power with the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. The party presided over the American Civil War and Reconstruction and was harried by internal factions and scandals toward the end of the 19th century. Today, the party supports a conservative platform (from an American political perspective), with further foundations in supply-side fiscal policies, and social conservatism. Merriam-Webster
Fascism: The term Fascism was first used of the totalitarian right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922–43); the regimes of the Nazis in Germany and Franco in Spain were also Fascist. Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach. Oxford dictionary
Image Source: AARP, which up to this moment, I didn't realize was so "woke."
Topics: Climate Change, Existentialism, Global Warming, Star Trek
The home world of the Ferengi species is Ferenginar. The Ferengi have a culture which is based entirely upon commerce. They follow a code of conduct known as "The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition." These rules ordain conduct such as "Never place family before business." Reportedly these rules are subject to interpretation depending upon the situation. Plea bargaining is a legal tradition, as is the purchasing of an apprenticeship following the Attainment Ceremony. There is no distinction between business and pleasure in Ferengi culture. Source: Star Trek (the link to Ferenginar is priceless)
In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq’s civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country’s vast oil reserves…. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater…. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened…. These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don’t succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.
Naomi Klein, though a Canadian author is a national treasure, that despite the faux-existential crisis between our nations initiated by a baboon. The Shock Doctrine came out in 2007, 6 years after 9/11; 11 years ago and her follow on books This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists follows the same theme: using the misery of others by climate, terrorism and war for profit. She is the proverbial "voice calling in the wilderness" metaphorically speaking, minus the camel's hair wardrobe and proto Paleo diet of locusts and wild honey. Quite literally, it is about the only planet the human species currently lives and exists on.
We may not be able to reverse climate change, but we can adapt to it—and climate change isn't all bad for the construction industry. Construction Business Owner tells us that climate change means warmer winters and a prolonged construction season for many states. And as the pressure grows to reduce our carbon footprint, new solutions and innovations are introduced within the construction industry each year. Source: Concentra: The Effects of Climate Change on Construction
We had literally decades to address this repeated, slow-moving catastrophe. There is only one thing that delayed any actions to mitigate it.
Profit. The crass, self-serving reason nothing about guns, climate change, terrorism or wars get any better. There are businesses that require this chaos. It's a part of their business model. Serenity and world peace are death knells to them. We see this in every American mass shooting that increases the profits of gun manufacturers, causing hand ringing and naval gazing by the news media, until the next shiny object diverts our attention. We saw it when we stumbled into Iraq on the manufactured lie of "weapons of mass destruction," the prelude to "alternative facts." Martin Paredes in Medium took a humorous stab at 47 rules of acquisition sans our twitter freak with presidential seal.
Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I had to give you the original.
Puerto Rico's death toll was raised from 64 to almost 3,000, approximating 9/11. The current resident of the executive mansion made his first tweet all about "no Russian collusion" on the 17th anniversary and a fantasy collaboration between his democratic opponent, the FBI, foreign spies and his Russian benefactors. He then denied almost 3,000 American citizens (which I doubt he knows they are) died at all. Puerto Rico is still under stress, they still have limited access to electrical power and in North Carolina, I have little confidence in the efficacy of government assistance from a raging lunatic.
The campus closed Wednesday at 5:00 pm. We await Hurricane Florence, whose eye proceeds up the Carolina coasts. An estimated 1 million people evacuated South Carolina, the highways converted to one-way lanes out. I have supplies for several days; no water's on the shelves in grocery or convenience stores. Gas stations have plastic bags on pump handles. This reminds me of Hurricane Sandy in upstate New York, when people from Manhattan drove up to gas up (get in a few fights) and drive back. This reminds me of Katrina: the citizens called "refugees" by the news media; in central Texas - grocery shelves stripped of water, food and empty pumps - the monstrous eye, the survivors on rooftops, the stratification of society before we called it by its modern nom de guerre "income inequality" and which sides of New Orleans recovered and which were purchased as distressed properties and gentrified. It would remind me of "heck of a job, Brownie," except the reality of failure would just be denied, "explained" and parroted by cult ditto heads. I have somehow been on a jury to witness the effects of climate change up close. It's something I didn't think I volunteered for.
For a very brief, shining moment, the republican presidential candidate George W. Bush talked about "compassionate conservatism." It was short-lived, as compassion led to diversity, black pres, healthcare and gay marriage. What is within the darkest bowels, hidden from view by "winks and nods" with coded language eventually erupts like a boil or a pimple; it is an infection that must emerge, and cannot be denied its day in the sun.
And, "We The People" breathlessly, daily await that rancid zit, who might actually tweet its first jumbled, insane thoughts during morning bowel movements.
Apokolips is a fictional planet appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The planet is ruled by Darkseid, established in Jack Kirby's Fourth World comic book series, and is integral to many stories in the DC Universe. Apokolips is considered to be the opposite of the planet New Genesis.Wikipedia
Apokolips is an ecumenopolis with burning firepits, extant in between dimensions, occupying a 'frequency' somewhere between the physical universe and Hell; the war that destroyed the Old Gods and created New Genesis and Apokolips separated the Fourth World from the rest of the universe proper, leaving it accessible by Boom Tube.
The population is a downtrodden lot, including many kidnapped from other worlds before being 'broken.' The majority of the population are called "Lowlies", a bald and fearful race that has no sense of self worth or value. The Lowlies are subject to constant abuse that ends only with death. Slightly above them are the Parademons, who serve as the keepers of order on the planet. Higher above the Parademons are the Female Furies, who are Darkseid's personal guard. (Male Furies also exist, but are less common.) They are blessed with unnatural strength and longevity and are allowed to develop as individuals. This exposure to new concepts often results in them developing comical or garish personalities that contrast strongly with the immense sadism that is required to reach their position. The leaders of the Furies are Granny Goodness, who sports the appearance of a matronly old woman while being the most powerful of the guards, and Kanto, who enjoys a unique position as Darkseid's master assassin. The chief guard, Big Barda, had a third position under Granny, which has not been filled since her defection from the group.DC Wiki
As if the name Apokolips wasn’t foreboding enough for this place, the planet is actually just one massive city that is peppered with raging fire pits. These pits are engines of war and torture, fueled by the very fire that stems from Darkseid himself. It is where the armors and weapons of the Parademons are forged and where they learn that pain is no obstacle, merely a nuisance.Apokolips Now: 15 Crucial Facts About The Justice League Movie Villains, Comic Book Review
And now...
The Trump administration has been working to rollback rules instated by the Obama administration that would limit how much methane gas could be vented to the atmosphere at oil- and gas-drilling and processing operations. In a press release today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it is proposing to relax Obama-era rules, saving the industry $484 million in avoided energy costs.
But the EPA is expected to justify its rules with analysis. That analysis (PDF) suggests that this regulatory rollback will also come with costs in the form of 308,000 short tons of methane emitted between 2019 and 2025. For context, the Aliso Canyon gas leak three years ago represented the largest accidental release of methane in US history, and over the four months that workers struggled to plug that well, 107,000 short tons of methane are estimated to have been released.
That is a serious amount of methane with serious climate consequences in the short-run. Methane is many times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, though it decomposes in the atmosphere more quickly. Carbon dioxide sticks around in the atmosphere for a longer time, but each individual molecule of CO2 has less of a warming effect than a molecule of methane.
The EPA's own analysis also says than an additional 100,000 short tons of volatile organic compounds and 3,800 short tons of hazardous air pollutants would also be emitted, compared to keeping the existing rules in place.
At 2:30 a.m. EDT (0630 UTC) on Sept. 11, the MODIS instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite looked at Hurricane Florence in infrared light. MODIS found coldest cloud top temperatures around the eye, as cold as or colder than minus 80 degrees (yellow) Fahrenheit (minus 112 degrees Celsius). Surrounding the eye were thick rings of powerful storms with cloud tops as cold as or colder than minus 70 degrees (red) Fahrenheit (minus 56.6 degrees Celsius). Credit: NASA/NRL
Topics: Climate Change, Global Warming, NASA, Stochastic Modeling, Research, Weather
Predictive Modeling: Another good reason why science is important.
NASA’s Aqua satellite provided an infrared look at powerful Hurricane Florence early on Sept. 11 that indicated it was likely undergoing eyewall replacement.
Intense hurricanes can and often undergo an eyewall replacement cycle. That happens when a new eyewall or ring of thunderstorms within the outer rain bands forms further out from the storm’s center, outside of the original eye wall. That ring of thunderstorms then begins to choke off the original eye wall, starving it of moisture and momentum. Eventually, if the cycle is completed, the original eye wall of thunderstorms dissipates and the new outer eye wall of thunderstorms contracts and replace the old eye wall. The storm’s intensity can fluctuate over this period, initially weakening as the inner eye wall dies before again strengthening as the outer eye wall contracts.
In a new study, Asst. Prof. Edwin Kite finds ocean planets could stay in zone of habitability longer than previously assumed. Copyright istockphoto.com
Topics: Astronomy, Astrobiology, Astrophysics, Exoplanet, Planetary Science, Space Exploration
The conditions for life surviving on planets entirely covered in water are more fluid than previously thought, opening up the possibility that water worlds could be habitable, according to a new paper from the University of Chicago and Pennsylvania State University.
The scientific community has largely assumed that planets covered in a deep ocean would not support the cycling of minerals and gases that keeps the climate stable on Earth, and thus wouldn’t be friendly to life. But the study, published Aug. 31 in The Astrophysical Journal, found that ocean planets could stay in the “sweet spot” for habitability much longer than previously assumed. The authors based their findings on more than a thousand simulations.
“This really pushes back against the idea you need an Earth clone—that is, a planet with some land and a shallow ocean,” said Edwin Kite, assistant professor of geophysical sciences at UChicago and lead author of the study.
As telescopes get better, scientists are finding more and more planets orbiting stars in other solar systems, called exoplanets. Such discoveries are resulting in new research into how life could potentially survive on other planets, some of which are very different from Earth—some may be covered entirely in water hundreds of miles deep.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a PhD student.Credit: David Hartley/Shutterstock
Topics: Astrophysics, Diversity, Diversity in Science, Nobel Prize, Pulsar, Women in Science
Fifty years after discovering pulsars — compact rotating stars that emit beams of radiation — astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been awarded one of the most lucrative prizes in science: a US$3-million Breakthrough prize. Thought by many to have been snubbed for a Nobel prize for the discovery1, Bell Burnell, 75, has been recognized by the Breakthrough committee with a special award in fundamental physics for both her scientific achievements and her “inspiring leadership” over the past five decades.
“I cannot think of a more deserving scientist to win this prize,” says Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. “In addition to being both a pioneer and a giant in the field, Bell Burnell is the highest calibre role model — a champion for women in science, who speaks out against the many inequities faced by women in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields.”
The Breakthrough prizes were launched in 2012 and are funded by entrepreneurs including Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg. Awarded in fundamental physics, life sciences and mathematics and each worth $3 million, they are usually handed out in December, based on selections made after an open nomination process. But the selection committee can decide to make special awards, bypassing the standard nomination procedure, to those they deem particularly deserving. Previous special awards have been given to Stephen Hawking, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration for the discovery of gravitational waves, and seven CERN scientists who co-ordinated the hunt for the Higgs boson.
"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters." Orange Satan, Snopes
Note: The disdain of a conman is he has no respect for his marks. If they fall for his shtick, he respects and fears them far less than the clear-eyed who won't be fooled.
Mutt without Jeff? Corn beef sans cabbage? Unthinkable. Knebel without Bailey? Well, it's hard to tell the difference. It's still the same sort of push button/panic button story about politics from the Pentagon to the Hill, only this time one of the levers got stuck close to the beginning. The one called Idea. This is, namely, that a president of the United States, and he's got his button (The Bomb), has lost his other buttons. He's mentally disabled. No one suspects that Mark Hollenbach, a figure of great rectitude and a strong drive for excellence, is paranoid. Except Jim MacVeagh, a senator, whom he has just tapped as his next running mate. Jim, young, attractive, but lazy, has a family. He also has had, on the side, Rita, ""the urgency and solace of sex."" As the F.B.I. investigates this, at Hollenbach's instigation, Jim tries to persuade others just before a private Summit meeting. They remain unconvinced, think Jim is disturbed, and only Rita can supply the evidence until the President's unreasonableness becomes apparent elsewhere, and action, sadly missing throughout the book, is finally taken...Let's see now -- it could be Fredric March, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner. Oh, no, that was Seven Days in May. This isn't.
There has been the flourishing of a cottage industry, from "Fire and Fury" by Mike Wolff; "A Higher Loyalty" by Former FBI Director James Comey; "What Happened" by Former Secretary and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton; "Unhinged" by Omarosa Manigault Newman and the soon-coming "Fear" by Bob Woodward. It's been a great year for authors; terrible for trees. He has been referred to as "a poor man's idea of what a rich man is like." He refers to himself in third person with the single syllable contraction of his name to invoke a Mafia kingpin. He's more a caricature of a caricature of actual mob bosses: imagining himself Vito or Michael Corleone of "The Godfather," when he's actually Fredo.
The New York Times Op Ed from a staffer that is internal to this "administration" is literally the icing on the cake. I am not sure if a five-deferment draft dodger, serial adulterer that pays off the silence of his mistresses and insults all of our allies, but routinely avoids insulting a foreign adversary with all the deference of a sex worker to a pimp can call the author "gutless." This is a Constitutional Crisis as David Frum, former speech writer for President George W. Bush (he was the "axis of evil" guy), opined such in The Atlantic. Real patriots step out of the shadows into the light. Real courageous actors don't "look the other way" and get tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation to the same Wall Street entities that caused the last Great Recessions (almost becoming a Great Depression). We appear determined to prove the definition of insanity.
Hans Christian Anderson's "The Emperor's New Clothes" has been shortened to a byword and pejorative "the emperor has no clothes," shouted originally from the mouth of a small child of his constituency in the story, saying what the more reserved adults around him dared not say. It is stating the blatantly obvious as the "Southern Strategy" grandparents of MAGA supporters once did, now parroted by their progeny:
"The Manchurian Candidate" as a movie came out in my birth year. It, like Knebel's Camp David is admittedly dystopian. It was a plausible thriller during the Cold War with the former Soviet Union that posited a hostile power could have unparalleled and unwanted influence on a political figure; the potential for controlling the office of the presidency. Plausible, but until recent events unthinkable. Life is stranger than art.
"Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over." Op Ed by Anonymous in the New York Times
The simulated radio images in this not-to-scale artist's illustration show superfast jets blasting from the black hole created by the merger of two neutron stars, a dramatic event observed in August 2017. In the 155 days between two observations, the jet appeared to move 2 light-years, a distance that would require it to travel four times faster than light. This "superluminal motion" is an illusion created as the jet is pointed nearly toward the Earth; it is actually moving at about 97 percent light speed. Credit: D. Berry, O. Gottlieb, K. Mooley, G. Hallinan, NRAO/AUI/NSF
Topics: Astrophysics, Cosmology, Einstein, Special Relativity, Star Trek
The dramatic neutron-star merger that astronomers spotted last year generated a jet of material that seemed to move at four times the speed of light, a new study reports.
"Seemed" is the operative word here, of course; the laws of physics tell us that nothing can travel faster through space than light. So, the superluminal motion was an illusion, which was caused by the jet's (still very fast) speed and the fact that it blasted almost directly at us, researchers said.
"Based on our analysis, this jet most likely is very narrow, at most 5 degrees wide, and was pointed only 20 degrees away from the Earth’s direction," study co-author Adam Deller, of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, said in a statement from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), a facility of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).
Moving pictures: microscope image of a quasicrystal two days after release. The right half has been color coded. (Courtesy: Po-Yuan Wang and Thomas Mason/Nature)
A quasicrystal made from tiny Penrose tiles that undergo Brownian motion has been created by Po-Yuan Wang and Thomas Mason at the University of California-Los Angeles. The duo was able to track changes in the 2D structure as tiles moved around, observing a range of effects including melting. As well as shedding further light on the properties of quasicrystals, the new lithographic fabrication technique could be used to study a wide range of colloidal systems.
Until relatively recently, scientists had assumed that all crystals have translational symmetry. This means they comprise a periodically-repeating unit cell of atoms that fills space without any voids. In contrast, quasicrystals do not have translational symmetry – they possess rotational symmetry – but also fill space without any voids.
The unexpected discovery of quasicrystalline materials was made in 1984 by the Israeli materials engineer Dan Shechtman, who was later awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Although the discovery was first met with skepticism, hundreds of solid-state quasicrystals have since been discovered. Furthermore, researchers are looking at potential applications of quasicrystals that range from aerospace to coatings of surgical and kitchen utensils.
As someone who recalls doing "duck and cover drills," I consider everyday a good day when this is not my sunrise.
The United States is not prepared to deal with the aftermath of a major nuclear attack, despite North Korea’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons and the increasing tensions between nations overall. That was the blunt assessment of public-health experts who participated in a meeting last week on nuclear preparedness, organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
The gathering is “an acknowledgement that the threat picture has changed, and that the risk of this happening has gone up”, says Tener Veenema, who studies disaster nursing at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and co-chaired the conference in Washington DC.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States’s research and preparedness efforts for a nuclear strike have focused largely on the possibility of a terrorist attack with a relatively small, improvised 1-kilotonne weapon or a ‘dirty bomb’ that sprays radioactive material.
But North Korea is thought to have advanced thermonuclear weapons—each more than 180 kilotonnes in size—that would cause many more casualties than would a dirty bomb (see ‘Damage estimates’). “Now that thermonuclear is back on the table, we’re back to people saying, ‘We can’t deal with this,’” says Cham Dallas, a public-health researcher at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Occasionally, I will alert fellow members to product updates by creators I have reviewed in the past year or so.
Here's what I found this week since I had extra time because it RAINED TOO MUCH!!!
Chessmasters by Insane Comics is gone. Even their back issues on Comixology are gone too. I was waiting for #6 to come out before buying the whole set. It's a shame. I think the writing crew is still active though at their facebook group Second Sight Studios.
Resistance: Battle of Philadelphia has finally past production! Releases Sept 7! Look for it at their site here. I was going to review it myself but someone else beat me to it.
Lawrence Johnson Sr. has made more stories (and audiobooks!) in the Da'quan detective story that continued in Murder on the Eros Star. They are up at Amazon and Smashwords. You can read the latest here.
Apparently, Marcus Stokes, director of The Signal, has worked on an episode of The Flash airing this winter? I think that's what his site says. You can see for yourself (and his other projects) here.
That's all I got this month. If you see a creator I've reviewed doing new stuff, post a comment down below.
The above is a very insightful interview from Chris Hedges, which its introduction gives a provocative image (not meant to be demeaning to the poor, nor sexist to women). In the Fermi Paradox that wasn't a paradox and apparently, wasn't Fermi's, the tantalizing, generic question of "where are the aliens?" may simply be answered by: if there were any, their civilization was probably consumed by their hierarchal rich.
Silent Spring began with a “fable for tomorrow” – a true story using a composite of examples drawn from many real communities where the use of DDT had caused damage to wildlife, birds, bees, agricultural animals, domestic pets, and even humans. Carson used it as an introduction to a very scientifically complicated and already controversial subject. This “fable” made an indelible impression on readers and was used by critics to charge that Carson was a fiction writer and not a scientist.
Carson’s passionate concern in Silent Spring is with the future of the planet and all life on Earth. She calls for humans to act responsibly, carefully, and as stewards of the living earth.
Additionally Silent Spring suggested a needed change in how democracies and liberal societies operated so that individuals and groups could question what their governments allowed others to put into the environment. Far from calling for sweeping changes in government policy, Carson believed the federal government was part of the problem. She admonished her readers and audiences to ask “Who Speaks, And Why?” and therein to set the seeds of social revolution. She identified human hubris and financial self-interest as the crux of the problem and asked if we could master ourselves and our appetites to live as though we humans are an equal part of the earth’s systems and not the master of them.
Carson expected criticism, but she did not expect to be personally vilified by the chemical industry and its allies in and out of government. She spent her last years courageously defending the truth of her conclusions until her untimely death in 1964.
Topics: African Americans, Civics, Civil Rights, History, Human Rights, Politics
Definition of MONKEY WITH
informal: to handle or play with (something) in a careless way: to monkey around with (something) I told you not to monkey with the lawn mower.
Definition of MONKEY
: a nonhuman primate mammal with the exception usually of the lemurs and tarsiers: a person resembling a monkey: a ludicrous figure : dupe
: mimic, mock: to act in a grotesque or mischievous manner Merriam-Webster
Definition of PROPAGANDA
1 : capitalized : a congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions2 : the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person3 : ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect Merriam-Webster
Only hours after their primary election victories, DeSantis appeared on Fox News and called Gillum an “articulate” candidate, adding: “The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting this state. That is not going to work. It’s not going to be good for Florida.”
The Florida Democratic party immediately decried DeSantis’s comment as racist. “It’s disgusting that Ron DeSantis is launching his general election campaign with racist dog whistles,” said the party chairwoman, Terry Rizzo, in a statement emailed to reporters.The Guardian
It has to be exhausting to his lawyers who probably give adequate advice to a guy who's more used to "winging it" and going from his pretentious, expansive gut.
It IS exhaustive to turn on the news for coverage of his latest insane stream-of-consciousness riff in 140 misspelled characters; endless lies, slurred speech and rude behavior. His predecessor was barred from giving a "back-to-school" pep talk in predominately red, decidedly racist districts (I had a back-and-forth with the Texas superintendent of the high school my youngest son attended - he eventually blocked my emails and ignored my calls). The biggest fear now from the orange Satan would be the number of "F-bombs" he'd likely drop veering off the teleprompter.
He's the poster-child of WAS[P] privilege that exasperates "the other" more qualified women, minorities that prepare for promotion and see the rug snatched from under them from ignoramus nincompoops. I enclose the "P" as White Anglo Saxon is physically evident: he's as marginally Protestant as his mastery of "Two Corinthians." His ascendancy has only revealed the evangelical community's callous hypocrisy. "Family values" is a pejorative, as 81% of them voted for the p---y grabber, and follow someone more in line with Damien in "The Omen" series than Yeshua of Nazareth.
We are well past "depending on what the meaning of the word is 'is'" into the realm of fantasy; the land of make believe. A recorded interview with Lester Holt (a republican, I might add) is suddenly "fudging" because the Dear Leader says so, and his ditto heads nod, mumbling something about the "deep state." Truth and reality are under daily assault, and it IS exhausting because we're dealing with a person with serious mental health issues, the most blatant being bigotry, demonstrated from the days he was a registered democrat. There is equal-opportunity to being an asshole.
Calling African Americans monkeys has recent examples in the Obama family depicted as chimpanzees (especially in Russia); Wulf D. Hund, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Department of Socioeconomics, University of Hamburg, and Charles W Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Northwestern University wrote an essay in The Conversation (published on Huffington Post, South Africa): "Comparing Black People To Monkeys Has A Long, Dark Simian History." It goes back to the cringe-worthy observations by news reporters regarding the diction of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell. How EXACTLY is a general supposed to speak other than with perfect diction? The point was so racist, Chris Rock made it a part of his stand up.
Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gilliam in Florida and Ben Jealous (my fraternity brother) in Maryland represent the changing demographics of the nation, its inexorable diversification. This is occurring after centuries of genocide (Native Americans); kidnapping and miscegenation of African Americans, multicultural relationships and marriages both gay and straight since Loving and immigration - both legal and illegal - that have some decrying the "melting pot" and looking backwards: to a time that "never was," when the nation had the "purity" of a blanched broth. Entropy and "times arrow" points forward, and forward typically denotes progress, and change.
We do this...together,all cultures; genders, republicans, democrats, independents as a NATION, without an outside hostile force selecting our leaders like "useful idiot" pawns on a grand chessboard - where the jester is only conversant in tick-tack-toe.
Researchers developed a mathematical model to determine how alien civilizations might cope with climate change. The research was led by astrophysicist Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester. The researchers looked at the problem of civilized planets facing climate change from an astrobiological perspective.
Frank says in a statement, "If we're not the universe's first civilization, that means there are likely to be rules for how the fate of a young civilization like our own progresses. The point is to recognize that driving climate change may be something generic. The laws of physics demand that any young population, building an energy-intensive civilization like ours, is going to have feedback on its planet. Seeing climate change in this cosmic context may give us better insight into what’s happening to us now and how to deal with it."
Schematic illustration of charge carriers confined within a TMD flake comprising different thicknesses. Charge carriers in the ground state (blue) can be excited upon resonant light excitation to a higher state (pink). Credit: ICFO/Fabien Vialla
All deference to the Apostle Paul. It seemed an apropos title to the post.
Semiconducting heterostructures are key to the development of electronics and opto-electronics. Many applications in the infrared and terahertz frequency range exploit transitions, called intersubband transitions, between quantized states in semiconductor quantum wells. These intraband transitions exhibit very large oscillator strengths, close to unity. Their discovery in III-V semiconductor heterostructures depicted a huge impact within the condensed matter physics community and triggered the development of quantum well infrared photodetectors as well as quantum cascade lasers.
Quantum wells of the highest quality are typically fabricated by molecular beam epitaxy (sequential growth of crystalline layers), which is a well-established technique. However, it poses two major limitations: Lattice-matching is required, restricting the freedom in materials to choose from, and the thermal growth causes atomic diffusion and increases interface roughness.
2-D materials can overcome these limitations since they naturally form a quantum well with atomically sharp interfaces. They provide defect-free and atomically sharp interfaces, enabling the formation of ideal QWs, free of diffusive inhomogeneities. They do not require epitaxial growth on a matching substrate and can therefore be easily isolated and coupled to other electronic systems such as Si CMOS or optical systems such as cavities and waveguides.
Surprisingly enough, intersubband transitions in few-layer 2-D materials had never been studied before, neither experimentally nor theoretically. Thus, in a recent study published in Nature Nanotechnology, ICFO researchers Peter Schmidt, Fabien Vialla, Mathieu Massicotte, Klaas-Jan Tielrooij, Gabriele Navickaite, led by ICREA Prof at ICFO Frank Koppens, in collaboration with the Institut Lumière Matière—CNRS, Technical University of Denmark, Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, CIC nanoGUNE, and the National Graphene Institute, report on the first theoretical calculations and first experimental observation of inter-sub-band transitions in quantum wells of few-layer semiconducting 2-D materials (TMDs).
More information: Peter Schmidt et al. Nano-imaging of intersubband transitions in van der Waals quantum wells, Nature Nanotechnology (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-018-0233-9
From Friday's post: “Putin’s thesis is that the American constitution is an experiment that will fail if it is challenged in the right way from within,” Mitchell continued. “Putin wants to break apart the American republic not by influencing an election or two, but by systematically inflaming the fault lines within our society. Accepting this fact is absolutely essential for developing a long-term response to the problem.”
Russian online users known as trolls are taking to social media to sow public conflict about vaccination, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health.
In what sounds like a hybrid story joining Star Trek and The Hobbit, US researchers from George Washington University, the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University found that bots, trolls, cyborgs, content polluters and other actors stimulate distrust in the efficacy of vaccination to prevent diseases.
Many of these actors spread false or misleading information, but sources identified as Russian in origin produce messages that argue on both sides of the discussion, with the aim, the researchers suggest, of “promoting discord”.
“Accounts masquerading as legitimate users create false equivalency, eroding public consensus on vaccination,” the report finds.
“These trolls seem to be using vaccination as a wedge issue, promoting discord in American society,” says Mark Dredze, one of the authors of the study.
If you are among the few that don't think our elections were compromised in a directed assault, this is more personal. Vaccinations impact what the CDC refers to as herd immunity. That has helped to eliminate diseases - mostly to children - that used to prove fatal to them.
