Take a look at this ASAPScience video explaining auditory illusions and phenomena such as the ‘Shepard Tone Illusion’.
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Earth only has one parent star, but other planets exist in systems much different than our own. Binary star systems are more common than single stars, and though planets in triple star systems are more rare, they are not unheard of. However, researchers have now identified a planet that is only the second one to ever be discovered in a quadruple star system. The existence of the planet was confirmed through observations from the Palomar Observatory in California. The research has been described in the Astronomical Journal.
The planet, which is considered a “hot Jupiter,” has been named 30 Ari and exists in the constellation Aries, 136 light-years from Earth. It is not habitable, as it is incredibly close to its primary star. It only takes three Earth days for the planet to complete one orbit.
“About four percent of solar-type stars are in quadruple systems, which is up from previous estimates because observational techniques are steadily improving,” co-author Andrei Tokovinin from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory said.
Despite the number of quadruple star systems out in the galaxy, 30 Ari is only the second exoplanet in such a system to be confirmed. It follows the 2013 discovery of KIC 4862625, which is about 5,000 light-years away. The planet was discovered via observations from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. It is hoped that more planets in unconventional systems will be discovered in order to increase the body of knowledge on how planets form under a variety of conditions.
“Star systems come in myriad forms. There can be single stars, binary stars, triple stars, even quintuple star systems,” added lead author Lewis Roberts of Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It’s amazing the way nature puts these things together.”
This system is fairly odd, however, because the stars in the system are a long distance away from one another. The primary and secondary star are 44,000 astronomical units (AU) away from one another. One AU is the average distance from the Earth to the sun. The third star in the system is closer to the primary, as it is 28 AU away. The fourth star discovered is the most proximal, at 23 AU.
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Earth has a long list of hits—and not of the musical variety, but of the rocky, celestial sort. In fact, asteroids have slammed into our planet and caused cataclysmic damage many times in its violent past. On less dramatic occassions, Earth is frequently hit with small asteroids that enter and disintegrate in its atmosphere. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Earth was hit by 556 small asteroids between 1994 and 2013. Most don’t make it through the atmosphere, but some—like the Chelyabinsk meteorite—crash-land with considerable force.
What would happen if a larger asteroid collided with Earth? A simulation by the Discovery Channel has provided a visual scenario to take us through it. According to the video’s description box, these are the details: “An asteroid with a diameter of 500 km. Destination: The Pacific Ocean. The impact peels the 10 km crust off the surface. The shockwave travels at hypersonic speeds. Debris is blasted across into low Earth orbit, and returns to destroy the surface of the Earth. The firestorm encircles the Earth, vaporizing all life in its way.”
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Though it looks more like a stability ball that you’d see at the gym, Guardbot is actually a round, land/water robot with many potential uses for broadcasting, spying, or security.
Though it began as a potential bot for missions to Mars, it is now being tested by the United States military to possibly assist in future patrolling duties.
The ball is about 60 centimeters (2 feet) in diameter, though it can be scaled up as large as 3 meters (9 feet) or as small as 10 centimeters (4 inches). The smaller version is perfect for searching underneath cars at security checkpoints. It is powered by a battery that lasts up to 8 hours.
The amphibious robot is capable of moving across a many landscapes, including sand, grass, mud, or even snow with a top speed of 9.7 kilometers per hour (6 mph). It is a bit slower in the water, maxing out at 6.4 kilometers per hour (4 mph). This might not be particularly fast, but it’s definitely enough to perform its necessary guard duties. The robot is also capable of climbing up hills with a 30 degree slope, making it able to guard a wide variety of locations.
]]>There are many incredible and enthralling things that happen right above our heads, every day. Unfortunately, due to weather conditions and light pollution, we’re not always able to see them. Fortunately, National Geographic has been kind enough to put together some breath taking footage so we can see it for ourselves.
The Northern Lights (or ‘Aurora Borealis’ in the north and ‘Aurora Australis’ in the south) occur a result of collisions between gaseous particles in the Earth’s atmosphere, and charged particles released from the Sun’s atmosphere.
Check this time lapse video they’ve created so you can see the full scope of the incredible scenes above the North Pole.
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Usually icebergs are white because they are made of compressed snow, which reflects all frequencies of visible light. However, if high pressures squeeze the flakes together, or sea water freezes, the gaps between the snowflakes disappear.
Now and then, an iceberg flips over, allowing us to see what has happened to its lower reaches. Most often this occurs when the iceberg has just calved, but occasionally it transpires later, for example in a storm.
When visiting Antarctica at the end of last year, filmmaker Alex Cornell came across the aftermath of one such event.
Cornell has also provided this comparison of an ordinary iceberg set against an upturned one.
Earlier this month, NASA and ESA released the biggest and highest resolution image of our galactic neighbor, Andromeda, that has ever been taken. The 1.5 billion pixel image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Each tiny dot of light in the picture represents one of 1 trillion stars in the galaxy; many with their own expansive planetary systems.
As you watch this video and think about Andromeda’s size, remember that this is just a small part compared to the rest of the universe. As large as this galaxy is, it is only one out of 200 billion galaxies in the known universe.
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1. He was passed over for his dream job.
In 1902, Einstein was appointed to the Swiss Patent Office as an examiner with some help from a friend, after he was disappointed in his hopes for a gig as a university professor.
“Largely that was his own fault-he wasn’t a great student,” says historian Matt Stanley of New York University. “He was disrespectful to his professors and skipped classes because he knew he could pass anyway. So, when he asked for recommendations, he didn’t get them.”
Sound familiar? Take heart from this: A backwater job didn’t stop Einstein from pursuing his dreams.
“Einstein’s family was involved in electronics, and the patent office was a world very familiar to him,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian David Kaiser.
Tasked with determining the soundness of principles behind new inventions, Einstein played to his talents and translated those skills to the scientific work that culminated in his 1905 “Miracle Year,” when he produced papers on light’s speed, atomic behavior, and the famous E = mc² equation that led to his Nobel Prize.
2. He liked to relax.
“Both of us, alas, dead drunk under the table,” Einstein wrote, referring to himself and his wife MilevaMaric, in a 1915 postcard sent to his pal Conrad Habicht.
Habicht was a co-founder of the Olympia Academy in Bern, Switzerland, a drinking club where friends debated philosophy and science.
“The young Einstein was a Bohemian, not the sage we think of now,” Stanley says. Much like a dorm-room bull session, “that’s what young people did then; they hung out in beer halls and argued about the nature of space and time.”
Einstein later said the club had a great effect on his career.
3. He had romantic troubles and a messy divorce.
Einstein married Maric, a fellow physicist, in 1903. She had already borne him a daughter named Lieserl the year before. Historians are unclear whether the couple gave up the child for adoption or if she died in infancy.
The couple was estranged starting around 1912 and divorced, finally, in 1919. As part of the divorce decree, which you can read in the archive, Einstein agreed that he would give his ex-wife most of the proceeds from a still un-awarded Nobel Prize, to care for the children and live off the interest.
“Young Einstein was a lot like the later one, uninterested in convention and set on having his own way, a bit of a rebel, irresistible to women,” Stanley says. “He dove into a few relationships that turned sour, although I think he learned some lessons later in life.”
Don’t we all.
Einstein married his cousin, Elsa, in 1919, the same year as his divorce.
4. His kids were rascals.
That’s what he calls them in a 1922 letter to his two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, asking them to write him in Spain when he was on the way back from a trip to Japan.
Einstein was obviously fond of his sons, writing to them from his travels and throughout their lives, inquiring about their schoolwork. Eduard’s life famously took a tragic turn when he was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 20.
The scientist also enlisted his older son, Hans Albert, in looking after his finances, asking him in 1922 to inquire at a Zurich bank about an unexpected sum of money in his account there.
Kids and money-some problems never change.
5. Road trip!
Einstein skipped the Nobel Prize ceremonies to take a trip to the Far East.
“I have decided definitely not to ride around the world so much anymore; but am I going to be able to pull that off, too?” he wrote his sons after his 1922 trip to Japan.
Unlike most of us, for Einstein travel was more than an escape from the mundane: The physicist acknowledges that the assassination that year of Germany’s foreign minister Walther Rathenau by right-wing extremists helped persuade him to leave Germany for a while.
Those same dark forces led to his eventual emigration to the United States from Europe, to escape Hitler’s spreading destruction of Germany’s Jews.
]]>Did you dress up as a giant panda this Halloween? Well, panda keepers in China take it a step further by sprinkling themselves with panda poop and pee!
“That’s to mask the human smell,” says Andrea Muller of Pandas International. By wearing panda suits when handling the cubs, caregivers minimize the animals’ stress and human attachment, Muller says.
At the International Crane Foundation in Wisconsin, staff dress like ghosts—wearing white to hide their bodies—and use a bird-shaped hand puppet to interact with baby whooping cranes hatched at the foundation.
“We try to replicate what actual parents do,” says Kim Boardman, the assistant curator of birds. “The puppet offers natural food, catches grasshoppers, and teaches chicks to forage.”
Biologist Tom Reimchen and his students at the University of Victoria in British Columbia wanted to see how salmon reacted to spirit bears—black bears with a genetic variation that gives them white fur—compared to more common black bears with black fur. So, Reimchen and his students wore either white or black fabric and waded in a fishing hole.
The salmon were less spooked by students wearing white, suggesting that spirit bears may be more successful at catching fish, possibly because the fish don’t recognize the rare bears as predators.
To see how moose around Yellowstone National Park would react to the smell of wolves that were making a comeback in the area, biologist Joel Berger of the Wildlife Conservation Society and his colleagues wore a moose suit. The suit allowed them to get close and drop wolf poop near the moose.
The scientists discovered that the moose had forgotten to run when they smelled a wolf, but the moose quickly learned to avoid the wolves when they returned to the area!
Sometimes, scientists resort to dressing up their technology rather than themselves.
To get close to emperor penguins in Antarctica, scientists camouflaged remote-controlled rovers to look like a penguin adult and chick. Many penguins tried to communicate with them. Studies also showed that the penguins were less stressed out by these robotic penguins than they were by humans.
In Kenya, researchers faced danger from hippos while trying to collect river water samples, but they knew that hippos and crocs ignore each other. So Amanda Subalusky, a graduate student at Yale University, and her colleagues decided to construct a remote-controlled boat disguised with a lifelike crocodile head and outfitted it with scientific instruments. The students were able to steer the boat through hippo swimming holes and collect the data they needed.
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A 3D printer is unlike common printers. 3D printing turns computer models into real, physical things.
How Does it Work?
On a 3D printer the object is printed by three dimensions. A 3D model is built up layer by layer. Therefore the whole process is called rapid prototyping, or 3D printing.
What Can You Make With a 3D Printer?
1) Wheels for 2-legged Dogs
This is TurboRoo, a Chihuahua puppy born without front legs. But thanks to a customized cart made with a 3D printer, he can now go wherever he wants. As he grows up, larger carts can be printed for him.
2) Replacement Human Organs
Scientists are still working on this. Right now, they can use 3D printers to create strips of organ tissue using actual cells. But if all goes according to plan, they will soon be able to create entire, actual replacement organs.
3) Portable Wheelchair Ramps
The plastic wedges in the picture above were made by a 3D printer. The fact that they’re portable means that hard-to-get-to places are more easily accessible for those in wheelchairs.
4) Hybrid Car – The Urbee 2
This is the Urbee 2, a car made out of parts created by a 3D printer. The developers hope to have it on the road by 2015, and will attempt to drive it across the country using just 10 gallons of gas.
5) Robo Hand
A teenager in Kansas made this robotic prosthetic hand for a 3rd-grader born without fingers on one hand. A regular prosthetic hand would have cost around $18,000, but this one that came from a 3D printer is much more affordable.
6) 3D Printer Lamp
This lamp is made using parts created by a 3D printer that snap together.
7) Hydroelectric Generator
This generator was created using parts made by a 3D printer. After the Japanese earthquake in 2011, it was used to generate electricity to areas that were without it.
8) Toothpaste Tube Squeezer
This device forces all your toothpaste to go toward the top of the tube. It can also be used for many other tube-related products. It’s that versatile.
9) Plastic Bag Holder
With this useful handle, you can easily carry around multiple grocery bags, just like carrying a briefcase.
10) 3D Printed Guitar
This is a working guitar made using a 3D printer. 3D printers can make many other instruments, including flutes, violins, whistles…pretty much anything else.
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