An innovative initiative is taking place in the Philippines to bring sustainable lighting to homes in impoverished communities. Empty plastic bottles are installed in the roof, filled with water and bleach they refract sunlight. These “solar light bulbs” provide light equivalent to a 55watt light bulb.
See how they’re made here. From Visual News
The glowing “firefly squid” of Toyama, Japan. Each tentacle contains a photophore which produces light to attract small fish for the squid to feed on.
The scales from the leaves of Elaeagnus angustifolia, a silvery shrub commonly known as a Russian olive. -Biocanvas
New Research Confirms The Existence of Dark Matter
Image: Don Dixon
Fans of dark matter can rest easy. A study published last month raised eyebrows by suggesting that our cosmic neighbourhood is empty of the extra mass needed to hold the galaxy together. But a re-analysis shows that the dark matter was there all along.
Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 83 per cent of the matter in the universe. It is responsible for keeping galaxies from flying apart despite their high spinning speeds, and has aided our understanding of how structures in the universe formed.
The most popular theories say that dark matter is a hitherto undetected particle called a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle) that is shy of interacting with ordinary matter through any force except gravity.
But several underground detectors waiting for WIMPs have come up empty, or with conflicting results. If the galaxy is so full of dark matter, why hasn’t it shown up yet?
In April, a team led by Christian Moni-Bidin of the University of Concepcion in Chile thought they had a solution: the WIMPs aren’t actually there.
The team tracked the motions of more than 400 stars within 13,000 light years of Earth to estimate the mass of matter – visible and dark – in the sun’s local neighbourhood. They concluded that the mass they found could be explained by the visible matter alone, with no need for dark matter.
But the team made a subtle error, say Jo Bovy and Scott Tremaine of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Moni-Bidin and colleagues considered stars whose orbits take them far above or below the Milky Way’s main bright disc, and used the speed at which they orbit the centre of the galaxy to figure out how much of a pull they feel from the nearby mass of stars and dark matter. They assumed that the stars’ speeds would be the same no matter how far they were from the galactic centre. Observations of dust clumps have shown that this assumption is true for young stars orbiting in the galactic disc, which mostly move in a near-perfect circle.
But the stars that orbit high above or far below the disc can’t have circular orbits, Bovy says. The only stars that reach such great heights have been kicked away from the disc by matter in the galaxy’s spiral arms, which sent them on highly elliptical orbits.
Full Article: Crisis averted: Dark matter was there all along
Earth from Space: Deep South Delta
This Landsat image of 3 October 2011 shows the Mississippi River Delta, where the largest river in the United States empties into the Gulf of Mexico. In this false-colour image, land vegetation appears pink, while the sediment in the surrounding waters are bright blue and green. The delta is known as the ‘bird-foot’ delta because of the shape created by the channels extending outward.
The size of the Mississippi River Delta built over millions of years owing to sediment deposition. The tons of sediment carried by the river system created the wetlands in southern Louisiana, which are home to many endangered species and help to protect the mainland from hurricane winds by acting like speed bumps.
Over the last several decades, however, the delta’s sediment load has been drastically reduced by natural and man-made factors. Extensive oil and gas extraction causes the subsidence of the delta and wetlands, and rising sea levels increase erosion as the fresh water vegetation dies due to the influx of salt water.
ORGANISM
[noun]
any contiguous living system (such as animal, fungus, micro-organism, or plant). In at least some form, all types of organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homeostasis as a stable whole.
An organism may either be unicellular (a single cell) or, as in the case of humans, comprise many trillions of cells grouped into specialised tissues and organs. The term multicellular (many cells) describes any organism made up of more than one cell.
The term “organism” (Greek ὀργανισμός – organismos, from Ancient Greek ὄργανον – organon, “instrument, implement, tool, organ of sense or apprehension”) first appeared in the English language in 1701 and took on its current definition by 1834 (Oxford English Dictionary). It is directly related to the term “organisation”. There is a long tradition of defining organisms as self-organising beings, i.e.; any complex thing or system having properties and functions determined not only by the properties and relations of its individual parts, but by the character of the whole that they compose and by the relations of the parts to the whole.
Eclipse from Outer Space
by A4size-ska
Note: This is art and NOT an image of the 2012 May 20 eclipse from orbit largely promoted as such via tumblr. Don’t believe everything you read.
