Will a set of photos make you have an existential crisis? Maybe these photos will. Alternatively, marvel at how the Earth looks from outer space! The World Economic Forum compiled stunning photographs of our home planet. Either be at awe at how marvelous the photos look or have a mini-crisis about how we are just a small speck of dust in a huge mass of heavenly bodies.
Image via World Economic Forum
A new theory suggests that black holes aren’t black in color, or holes at all! Surprising, I know. According to the theory, black holes may be dark stars with hearts of extremely dense, exotic matter. At the center of a black hole lies what scientists call a singularity, a infinitely small and dense point where the pull of gravity is so strong that it surpasses the speed of light:
The problem? The singularity appears to be physically impossible, because matter isn’t capable of collapsing into an infinitely small point.
Physicists have cleverly dodged this issue by inventing their own singularity-free black holes, which they call “dark stars”. These imaginative creations appear like black holes on the outside, but inside, they contain an extremely (but not infinitely) dense core of matter compressed to the tiniest possible scale, or a “Planck core”. It borrows its name from the incredibly small fundamental unit of measurement called the Planck length, which is on the order of 10^-35 meters, or roughly 100 trillion times smaller than a proton.
Without a singularity at its center, a dark star could theoretically allow light to escape its powerful gravitational grasp. Any light that would escape the black hole would be stretched like a slinky from the dark star’s gravitational pull, an observable phenomenon scientists call redshift.
“In strong gravitational fields, [dark stars] behave interestingly,” physicist Igor Nikitin, of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Scientific Algorithms and Computing, writes in his new paper, which appears on the preprint server arXiv:
“First of all, the event horizon, typical for real black holes, is erased. Instead, a deep gravitational well is formed, where the values of the redshift become enormously large. As a result, for an external observer the star looks black, like a real black hole.”
Image via Popular Mechanics
Meet the specialized tool that can let you know who owns a website, without spending a long time looking through Google search results! The WhoIs lookup tool returns whatever available information there is about “who is” responsible for the site, regardless of how old the website is. There is certain private information that would not appear in the results for every site. Popular Science lists information people will find when running the tool:
View the rest at Popular Science.
Image via Popular Science
Ocean researcher Tomoko Narazaki noticed that a turtle population that they were tracking for a study often swam in circles for no apparent reason. It is more efficient for marine animals to swim in straight lines, and the way these turtles swam as they navigated across the ocean seemed odd, so Narazaki and her colleagues looked at different data from other sea creatures, and to their surprise, found that other than turtles, sharks, seals, penguins, and whales also swim in circles:
The discovery, which was made possible thanks to advances in tagging and 3D-biologging technologies, reveals that swimming in circles is a widespread adaptation that may serve many ecological functions, according to a study published in iScience on Thursday.
“Analysis of animal tracks provides our understanding of navigation, moving capacity, and internal state of moving animals, as well as identifying the effect of external factors affecting their movements,” said Narazaki and her colleagues in the study.
“Marine animals move through an inherently 3D environment, yet their movements have been primarily examined in less dimensions,” the team added, a discrepancy that is “due to logistical and technical difficulties primarily derived from seawater’s impermeability to radio waves.”
In other words, collecting high-resolution information about the motions of marine animals in three dimensions has been an entrenched technological challenge for scientists. But within the past decade or so, the advent of sensors that can record detailed geographic and behavioral data has allowed scientists to hone in on precise features of animal movements such as pitch, heading, and small changes in depth. These biologging innovations now enable scientists to capture behaviors like the circle-swimming described in the new study.
Image via Vice
The Bayeux Tapestry is believed to be commissioned as an apology gift for the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The tapestry captures how people and events looked in medieval Europe in stylized detail. For the first time, enthusiasts and curious minds alike can view and zoom through a digital version of the artwork at the Bayeux Museum’s website, as Open Culture details:
The museum “worked with teams from the University of Caen Normandie to digitize high-resolution images of the tapestry, which were taken in 2017,” says Medievalists.net.
“A simple interface was created to access the digital version, which allows users to zoom in and explore it in great detail with access to Latin translations in French and English.” Made of 2.6 billion pixels (which brings it to eight gigabytes in size), the online Bayeux Tapestry lets us zoom in so far as to examine its individual threads — the same level at which it was inspected in real life earlier last year in anticipation of its next restoration.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Talk about having the right timing and luck! A photographer was able to catch a giant manta ray as it leaped out of the water while he was taking a photo of a surfer at a Florida beach. Rusty Escandell didn’t realize the wonderful coincidence until he got home after having fun near Officers Club Beach at Patrick Space Force Base, as CNN details:
"I kind of saw a splash behind the surfer, but didn't think much of it," he said. "It could have been a fish, could have been anything."
Escandell had taken a burst of photos that showed the ray breaching out of the water.
"It was pretty amazing," he said.
His daughter and her boyfriend are both marine biologists and said they'd seen some manta rays in the water after he took the photo, Escandell said.
Escandell owns an auto repair shop and lives in nearby Satellite Beach, and said he enjoys taking pictures at the beach fairly regularly.
He didn't know the surfer in the photo, but they've talked since the photo went viral.
"He's excited too," Escandell said.
Image via CNN
Meet the magical box that could produce oxygen on Mars! Okay, maybe not magical. The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is capable of pulling oxygen from Mars’ poisonous atmosphere! The golden, breadbox-sized apparatus is tucked away inside Perseverance’s chassis, and the first demonstration of MOXIE will be called in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), as Live Science details:
NASA has long been interested in ISRU and put out a call for an oxygen-producing experiment when Perseverance was first being conceived, Eric Daniel Hinterman, an aerospace engineering doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the MOXIE team, told Live Science.
While oxygen is useful for astronauts to breathe, Hinterman said that it's even more important as rocket propellant. When combined with hydrogen, oxygen combusts in a powerful explosion that is used to lift many modern rockets from their launch pads.
In addition to the propellant needed to get off Earth and fly to Mars, a spacecraft bringing humans to the Red Planet would need between 66,000 and 100,000 pounds (30,000 and 45,000 kilograms) of oxygen to return home, according to NASA. "We can send that oxygen from Earth to Mars, but if we can make it on the surface that potentially saves us a lot of money," Hinterman said.
Any additional oxygen produced through ISRU technology could go into life-support systems for astronauts while on the surface of Mars, Hinterman said.
In order to reach the ground, Perseverance had to go through a complicated sky crane maneuver and the famous "seven minutes of terror" that subjected all of its components to some fairly extreme forces. A few days after landing, the MOXIE team put the instrument through a series of what are known as "aliveness" tests to make sure it was in working order.
Image via Live Science
Hey, any research that lets you be in proximity of adorable furballs is a good enough motivation for me! Four hundred adorable puppies helped researchers answer the question of understanding body language. The proponents of the study enlisted the help of these puppies to show the canine ability to understand human pointing, which appears to be hardwired in their DNA:
“Using puppies to answer this question is a great approach,” says Heidi Parker, a geneticist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Dog Genome Project who was not involved with the work. “Behavior is the holy grail of dog genetics,” she says. Before scientists go searching for genes that may have turned dogs into our faithful companions, they need to make sure they’re there in the first place, she says. “I feel like this study shows that.”
Scientists have known for more than 2 decades that dogs understand the logic behind a surprisingly complex gesture: When we point at something, we want them to look at it. That insight eludes even our closest relatives, chimpanzees, and helps our canine companions bond with us. But it’s been unclear whether pooches acquire this ability simply by hanging out with us, or it’s encoded in their genes. “It’s the one piece of the puzzle we don’t have evidence for,” says Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona.
Enter puppies. If social intelligence is genetic, dogs should display it at a very young age. And there shouldn’t be any learning required.
That’s what MacLean and his colleagues found. The scientists partnered with Canine Companions for Independence, which breeds dogs to assist people in the United States with post-traumatic stress disorder and physical disabilities. The group loaned the researchers 375 8-week-old Labrador and golden retriever pups: They were just old enough to participate in the experiments, but young enough to have had very little interaction—and thus experience or learning—with people.
Image via Science Magazine
It’s like a scene from a fantasy novel, or a fairy tale. Photographer Michael Shainblum showcased the grandeur of Yosemite National Park in a new light. Shainblum’s photography exhibits the dream-like quality of the park, cast in thick fog and rainbow mist. The photos were shot in winter after a dusting of snow, further amplifying the fantasy-esque vibes these photos have.
Image via the Colossal
Social reality is our way of embracing and making sense of our environment. This reality involves people attributing meaning and labels to the objects we see around us. Alternatively, our social reality can simply make something up and communicate it and its meaning to other people and be treated as a real thing, as Science Focus details:
Brexit is also social reality. Even your own name is social reality. Someone just made it up, and you and other people treat it as real. In fact, most of us spend most of our time in a real world of serious make-believe.
How do human brains create social reality? To answer this, let’s consider it from a brain’s point of view. For your whole life, your brain is trapped inside a dark, silent box called your skull.
Your brain constantly receives data from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sense organs. It also receives a continuous stream of sense data from inside your body as your lungs expand, your heart beats, your temperature changes, and the rest of your insides carry on their symphony of activity.
All this data presents a mystery to your brain-in-a-box. Together, the data represents the end result of some set of causes that are unknown.
When something in the world produces a change in air pressure that you hear as a loud bang, some potential causes could be a door slamming, a gunshot, or a fish tank toppling to the floor. When your stomach unleashes a gurgle, the cause might be hunger, indigestion, nervousness, or love.
To learn more about how our minds shape reality, check the full piece here.
Image via Science Focus
This 1.7-gigapixel image of the Milky Way took J-P Metsavainio nearly 12 years to create. The Finnish astrophotographer estimates that the exposure time for the photo was 1,250 hours. Wow! Metsavainio started the project way back in 2009, and focused on different areas and objects in the galaxy, as PetaPixel details:
To complete the ultra-high-resolution view of the Milky Way as a whole, Metsavainio then set out to fill in the gaps that weren’t covered by his original artworks.
“I think this is a first image ever showing the Milky Way in this resolution and depth at all three color channels (H-a, S-II, and O-III),” Metsavainio tells PetaPixel.
The photo is 100,000 pixels wide and comprises 234 individual panels stitched together.
Image via PetaPixel
There’s still some water on Mars, apparently! According to a new NASA-backed study, a significant portion of Mars’ moisture is trapped in its crust. Caltech PhD candidate Eva Scheller, the lead author of the study, looked at models that quantified the amount of water on Mars over time, as CNET details:
They found that the atmospheric escape theory could not completely account for conditions seen today above and below the surface of our neighboring world.
"Atmospheric escape clearly had a role in water loss, but findings from the last decade of Mars missions have pointed to the fact that there was this huge reservoir of ancient hydrated minerals whose formation certainly decreased water availability over time," explains Bethany Ehlmann, CalTech professor of planetary science.
When water and rock interact, a chemical weathering process can occur that creates materials such as clays that contain water within their mineral structure. This process happens on Earth, but the geological cycle eventually sends moisture trapped in rocks back into the atmosphere via volcanism. Mars, however, appears to have very little if any volcanic activity, leaving all that water stuck in the crust.
"All of this water was sequestered fairly early on, and then never cycled back out," Scheller says.
The team found that 4 billion years ago, Mars had enough water to cover the entire planet with an ocean between 100 and 1,500 meters (328 and 4,920 feet) deep, and that between 30% and 99% of that water is now trapped in minerals in the crust.
Image via wikimedia commons
I wish my slumber was as deep and long as this walrus’s was! A rare walrus was spotted on the western shore of Ireland, and experts assume that the animal most likely fell asleep on an iceberg in the Arctic and managed to wake up on Ireland after its nap. The walrus was first spotted by Alan Houlihan and his five-year-old daughter, as Travel and Leisure details:
"I thought it was a seal at first and then we saw the tusks. He kind of jumped up on the rocks. He was massive. He was about the size of a bull or a cow, pretty similar in size, he's big, big," Houlihan said. "He was right beside us, less than 50 meters away from us. He went off again for a while and he came back and went back to the rocks."
While absolutely adorable, Flannery noted that the animal is likely very tired, and very hungry, after such a long journey. He urged the public to make sure to give the animal plenty of space if they encounter it.
"Hopefully he'll get a few scallops around Valentia. But at this point, he wants to rest. He's come from the North Pole, possibly off Greenland," Flanner said. "He could also be island-hopping and went to Iceland and on to Shetland but that's unlikely. I'd say he came in out of the Atlantic. It's thousands of miles away. If he regains his strength hopefully he'll make his way back up."
Image via wikimedia commons
The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient fragments of biblical texts dating back almost 2,000 years. A new set of these ancient scrolls have been discovered in the West Bank, the first set of biblical scrolls to be discovered in 60 years. A four-year archaeological project discovered the scrolls, identified to be portions of the Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, including the books of Zechariah and Nahum:
Also uncovered was a 6,000-year-old skeleton of a partially mummified child and a 10,500-year-old basket, which Israeli authorities said could be the oldest in the world. A CT scan revealed the child's age was between 6 and 12 — with the skin, tendons and even hair partially preserved.
Among the recovered texts, which are all in Greek, is Nahum 1:5–6, which says: "The mountains quake because of Him, And the hills melt. The earth heaves before Him, The world and all that dwell therein. Who can stand before His wrath? Who can resist His fury? His anger pours out like fire, and rocks are shattered because of Him."
The authority said these words differ slightly from other Bible versions, shedding a rare light on how biblical text changed over time from its earliest form.
The first set of Dead Sea Scrolls to be discovered were found by a Bedouin shepherd in the same area in 1947 and are considered among the most important archaeological finds of the 20th century, although biblical scholars disagree on their authorship.
Image via NBC News
Thanks to Amazon’s recommendation algorithms, conspiracy theorist David Ickle’s book The Answer is now on the site’s top 30 bestseller list for Communication and Media Studies. Other COVID conspiracy theory books are also being suggested to people who are searching for information about the pandemic. Buzzfeed News has more details :
The problem highlights how Amazon’s search and book promotion mechanisms often direct customers to COVID-19 conspiracy titles. Tuters does not advocate for banning the books but says Amazon needs to follow the lead of other platforms and elevate reliable information about COVID-19.
For roughly a year, Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and Twitter have placed authoritative information about COVID-19 and vaccines at the top of results pages when people search for information about the pandemic, and removed coronavirus misinformation from their platforms and their recommendation systems. This stands in stark contrast to Amazon, where researchers found that COVID conspiracy books have appeared on the first page of search results for basic terms like “covid,” “covid-19,” and “vaccine.” Amazon also recommended conspiracy books when the researchers browsed non-conspiratorial books about the virus and related topics.
An Amazon spokesperson said that beginning in February 2020, the company placed a banner with a link to resources about COVID-19 when people search for terms related to the pandemic. It began doing the same for vaccines this January.
“We’ve added links to these sites (ex. the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization) at the top of the search result pages if a customer searches for books related to vaccines or the coronavirus,” they said.
But this feature is not consistent across Amazon’s international stores.
Image via Buzzfeed News
