Call the professional
Misery - 비참
Sister tells me I make others miserable. Tells me I’m bi-polar.
I say my family and their store makes me miserable. The same reasons for my sudden mood changes.
Yet,
I create more misery in my life by my own hands. But I don’t mind.
For I am the creator of this little percentage of misery. No sudden mood changes here.
Astronomers Use Kepler Spacecraft to Search for Exomoons
Illustration: Concept rendering of a Jupiter-like planet is seen orbiting from the perspective of a life abundant exomoon.
We’ve been reassured time and again on the presence of ‘Exoplanets’ and the possibilities they hold, but like our very own planet Earth, could they too hold a moon of their own? If so could these ‘Exomoons’ potentially harbor conditions favorable to life? Take Jupiter’s own moon Europa for instance, a moon shown to possibly hold oceans underneath its icy crust. Were we to send our manned tools to Europa and dig enough could we find life underneath? In this article SciAm talks with renowned Exomoon hunter David Kipping to lend his expertise on the subject of such Extra solar moons and how they might go about spotting them:
Astronomers have discovered a trove of exoplanets—more than 700 worlds in orbit around distant stars, with leads on thousands of additional suspects. So now, naturally, they’re beginning to ask: What moons might be in orbit about these planets?
It is a reasonable question. Most of the planets in our solar system host sizable natural satellites. And in some planetary systems, the moons of an extrasolar planet could themselves be favorable habitats for extraterrestrial life.
To answer it, a team of astronomers is now digging through publicly available data from Kepler, NASA’s prolific exoplanet-finding spacecraft, in hopes of detecting the faint signal of the first known exomoon.
“It’s something that I’ve been very passionate about for a long time,” says David Kipping, who wrote his PhD thesis at University College London last year on exomoons. Now a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Kipping is leading the Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler project, or HEK. He and his colleagues described the HEK campaign in a recent study posted to the preprint Web site arXiv.org that has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.
“When I first started this, I was just seeing what was possible,” Kipping says. “As I went on with this, I realized that it wasn’t just a crazy idea.” He and his colleagues calculated that if large moons are common in the galaxy, Kepler might be sensitive enough to find them.
Since 2009, the Kepler spacecraft has trailed Earth in orbit around the sun, doggedly pursuing a deceptively simple mission. With a giant digital camera, Kepler keeps watch on a field of more than 150,000 stars near the constellation Cygnus. It watches those stars for so-called transits—instances where a planet passes in front of its host star, which slightly and temporarily diminishes the star’s apparent brightness. So far, the mission has been incredibly productive; Kepler scientists have discovered more than 60 new exoplanets and have identified more than 2,000 likely candidates that await confirmation.
Some 50 of those candidates fall in the so-called habitable zone, the region around a star where temperatures would allow for the presence of liquid water and perhaps the emergence of life. A gas-giant planet in the habitable zone, akin to a warmer Jupiter or Saturn, would lack a solid surface and hence would not be an ideal habitat for life—but its moons might be. “There could be a lot of habitable moons out there, and we want to know about them,” Kipping says.
Yes. Many pet owners have seen their sleeping dog or cat twitch or paw the air, as if dreaming of bones to bury or mice to chase.
Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and author of the book The Intelligence of Dogs, says that canines go through the same sleep stages as we do, only faster.
After about 20 minutes, a dog enters REM sleep, the stage in which most vivid dreams occur. Big dogs dream longer, Coren says, and little dogs dream quickly and frequently.
He doesn’t know why, and neither does anyone else. Insects and fish don’t experience REM sleep, but some birds and all mammals do. Reptiles might also experience REM, and some scientists argue that our mammalian dreaming might be a holdover from our reptilian brains.
The purpose of dreaming remains a mystery, but infants (of all species) dream more often. This is probably because the sensory stimulation helps form new neural connections.
In adults, the best working theory is that dreams stimulate the regions of the brain associated with memory. Finches replay the melody of their birdsong in their dreams, and lab rats retrace the mazes they have run.
10 Brain-Based Learning Laws That Trump Traditional Education
These two were my favorites, because they’ve had the biggest impact on my style of presenting.
4. White space trumps information dumps.
Many presenters try to cram as much information and data into their presentation as the time permits. We’ve assumed that content covered means content learned. We’ve also assumed that if we cover more content, the listener learns more.
Wrong! The amount of learning directly aligns to the amount of thinking and reflection. We need to create more white space (time for the learner to think) and less pushing of content. The more the learner is allowed to reflect, the more they learn.
5. Images trump words.
We remember images. We forget words. Why? 50%-80% of our brain’s natural processing power is devoted to processing sight. That’s more than all of our other senses. We actually see with our brains, not our eyes. Likewise, when we hear a word, our brain translates it into an image.
Underwater explosion of ink
(via reddit)
Galactic View from Canary Islands
by Tunc Tezel
The band of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is photographed above mountains of Tenerife, Canary Islands.
This is just beautiful
Beatrice the Biologist: Biology Doesn’t Support Gay Marriage Bans
When there’s such ravenous effort out there to classify marriage as only between a man and a woman, don’t you think we’d have a better definition of exactly what a “man” and a “woman” were? When you dig down into the alignments of and X and Y sex chromosomes, you come up with more gray area than black and white. Check out Beatrice’s full post for more.
Sex is not the binary system we think it is, and we can’t go around making rules about what people can and can’t do based on what anatomy happens to be between their legs. So on top of the fact that gay marriage bans are unconstitutional, unnecessary, and downright petty, they are also terribly unscientific.
Love the cartoons in this post:
Spectacular ‘cloud tsunami’ rolls over Florida high-rise condos
(Source: lizeegillespie)
