The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. This is an important step along the trail of finding the chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life, as we know it.
Based upon the study of lava flows of basalt throughout the world, it has been proposed that the Earth's magnetic field reverses at intervals, ranging from tens of thousands to many millions of years, with an average interval of approximately 250,000 years. The last such event, called the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, is theorized to have occurred some 780,000 years ago.
There is no clear theory as to how the geomagnetic reversals might have occurred. Some scientists have produced models for the core of the Earth wherein the magnetic field is only quasi-stable and the poles can spontaneously migrate from one orientation to the other over the course of a few hundred to a few thousand years. Other scientists propose that the geodynamo first turns itself off, either spontaneously or through some external action like a comet impact, and then restarts itself with the magnetic "North" pole pointing either North or South. External events are not likely to be routine causes of magnetic field reversals due to the lack of a correlation between the age of impact craters and the timing of reversals. Regardless of the cause, when magnetic "North" reappears in the opposite direction this is a reversal, whereas turning off and returning in the same direction is called a geomagnetic excursion.
"It's called a flux transfer event or 'FTE,'" says space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn't exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible."
Indeed, today Sibeck is telling an international assembly of space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama, that FTEs are not just common, but possibly twice as common as anyone had ever imagined.
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Researchers have long known that the Earth and sun must be connected. Earth's magnetosphere (the magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet) is filled with particles from the sun that arrive via the solar wind and penetrate the planet's magnetic defenses. They enter by following magnetic field lines that can be traced from terra firma all the way back to the sun's atmosphere.
"We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active," says Sibeck. "We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic."
Several speakers at the Workshop have outlined how FTEs form: On the dayside of Earth (the side closest to the sun), Earth's magnetic field presses against the sun's magnetic field. Approximately every eight minutes, the two fields briefly merge or "reconnect," forming a portal through which particles can flow. The portal takes the form of a magnetic cylinder about as wide as Earth. The European Space Agency's fleet of four Cluster spacecraft and NASA's five THEMIS probes have flown through and surrounded these cylinders, measuring their dimensions and sensing the particles that shoot through. "They're real," says Sibeck.
You might want to take John Hodgman's new book, "More Information Than You Require," with a grain of salt. Or maybe the whole shaker.
Like its predecessor, "The Areas of My Expertise," Hodgman's latest is an almanac-style compendium of facts ranging from the historical to the trivial. Except it's largely bogus, often completely made up and delightfully absurd.CNN:Why did you decide to do a second book?
John Hodgman: My first book was called "The Areas of My Expertise," and like my new book, it was a collection of fascinating trivia and historical oddities and amazing true facts -- with the advantage that all the amazing true facts were made up by me.
I really wanted to write the second book, "More Information Than You Require," because [with] the first book of fake facts [being] only 236 pages long, people might think that I was a sane person. By adding an additional 300 pages to the total world knowledge count, I now look completely insane.
CNN: How do you go about researching your book?
Hodgman: I compile it by not doing any. My research generally involves me sitting down and thinking of all the half-truths and common misperceptions I've picked up along the way, and then I'll supplement that with a little bit of surfing the Internet, which is my favorite repository of dubious scholarship, and then I fuse that into the kind of world-complete knowledge that only my book can provide -- unresearched, largely fictional and entirely true.
CNN: Your book contains some interesting information about the electoral process, for instance.
Hodgman: It is that time of year that we pretend to vote for a president -- and I say "pretend" because, of course, we cast our ballots and create the popular vote and then all of those ballots are taken to a vault in upstate New York and hidden away and never looked at again. And then it goes to the Electoral College.
Now the Electoral College is a beautiful college in upstate New York. A lot of people have visited its campus. The town of Electoral is not much to speak of, I have to say.
CNN:And in your book we learn some strange but "true" things about America's presidents, including Woodrow Wilson.
Hodgman: Yes, Wilson was incapacitated after he had a stroke, so they had to put him in a special "stroke box," and from that time on, his wife really acted as the de facto president. That's why he was given the nickname "The President Who Is Secretly a Lady," and lots of people thought she was running interference and making all the decisions, and from time to time, they would say "Look, we need to see the president."
He was locked away in a closet, and she would bring him out, and even then they were suspicious -- they thought he might be a ventriloquist dummy shaped as Woodrow Wilson. But she had them tricked -- it was ventriloquist dummy made entirely out of Woodrow Wilson.
In February 2003, the Boomerang Nebula, was found to be −272.15 °C; 1 K, the coldest place known outside a laboratory. The nebula is 5,000 light-years from Earth and is in the constellation Centaurus.[7]And actually, scientists have been able to push temperatures down far closer to absolute zero (but can never feasibly reach absolute zero) in the lab than has ever been observed in space. At these temperatures even light behaves differently, check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_zero
The speed of light, as we've all heard, is a constant: 186,171 miles per second in a vacuum. But it is different in the real world, outside a vacuum; for instance, light not only bends but also slows ever so slightly when it passes through glass or water. Still, that's nothing compared with what happens when Hau shines a laser beam of light into a BEC: it's like hurling a baseball into a pillow. "First, we got the speed down to that of a bicycle," Hau says. "Now it's at a crawl, and we can actually stop it—keep light bottled up entirely inside the BEC, look at it, play with it and then release it when we're ready."What an amazing concept...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/12359501.html
The idea of heat death stems from the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy tends to increase in an isolated system. If the universe lasts for a sufficient time, it will asymptotically approach a state where all energy is evenly distributed. In other words, in nature there is a tendency to the dissipation (energy loss) of mechanical energy (motion); hence, by extrapolation, there exists the view that the mechanical movement of the universe will run down in time due to the second law.So anyways, theres no real need to fret, because as Sir Martin Rees so elequently puts it in his TED talk: "...by that time... human beings will look nothing like they do now..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Freeze
Who knew???
