This is how spectroscopy works – how you can tell what’s floating around in space even when you can’t see it, only light that passes *through* it. The Hubble Space Telescope is especially good at this. It’s got an imaging spectroscope on board.
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In the book Mysterium Comsmographicum, Johannes Kepler started mapping out how planets worked.
The idea here is that the solar system is structured according to the Platonic solids, one nesting in the other.
Later on, Kepler figured out how gravity worked and that the real geometry of planetary motion was a circle with two centers – an
Yes, technically not a theremin, but one of its children.
Bruno Perrault played the ondes Martenot and Matteo Ramon Arevalos played the piano, recorded on 21 February 2006.
Murail is a “spectral” composer – he creates melodies based on the shapes of the sounds as represented mathematically… or visualized on a spectrogram.
Martin Ulikhanyan composed this dreamy piece, which was recorded on 16 March 2013, conducted by Zaven Vardanyan. Ulikhanyan has a YouTube channel and a Soundcloud account.
Happy listening.
From the book Waterfowl in Iowa, by Jack W. Musgrove and Mary R. Musgrove, published by the Iowa State Conservation Commission.
I found this self-explanatory duck, marl to tail, on Scientific Illustration.
One of a series of videos in which white-gloved technicians from the Florence Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica (Science and Technics Foundation) operate antique scientific equipment, demonstrating how the devices reveal the secrets of nature.
Quietly. Reverently. Meditatively. Efficiently.
Nature uncovers the secret lives of creatures that never grow old:
A comparison of standardized demographic patterns across 46 species, published today in Nature, suggests that the vast diversity of ‘ageing strategies’ among them challenges the notion that evolution inevitably leads to senescence, or deterioration of mortality and fertility, with age, says Owen Jones, a biologist at the University [...]
Reuters reports on Curiosity’s latest discovery – the dried bed of what was apparently once a mucky, life-filled lake on Mars:
The lake, located inside Gale Crater where the rover landed in August 2012, likely covered an area 31 miles long and 3 miles wide, though its size varied over time.
Analysis of sedimentary deposits gathered by NASA’s Mars rover [...]
Shades of Philip Larkin…. Washington Post has more on how mice, at least, pass fear down with their DNA:
In the experiment, researchers taught male mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms by associating the scent with mild foot shocks. Two weeks later, they bred with females. The resulting pups were raised to adulthood having never been [...]
This is how spectroscopy works – how you can tell what’s floating around in space even when you can’t see it, only light that passes *through* it. The Hubble Space Telescope is especially good at this. It’s got an imaging spectroscope on board.
[via]
Meaning, although PhysOrg stops short of saying so, that we could maybe someday build a hominin from scratch. As it is, though, we’ve still got a lot we can do today, now that we’ve figured out the 400,000-year-old genetic code of Homo heidelbergensis:
Matthias Meyer and his team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have [...]
International Business Times hints at what the first commercial satellite means for the future of space:
After two failed launch attempts due to technical glitches last week, the 22-story Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 5:41 p.m. EST. The rocket carried a 7,000-pound communications satellite called “SES-8,” owned by Luxembourg-based SES S.A., [...]
Science Daily has Hubble’s latest clue to finding life elsewhere in space. The telescope has found five distant, watery worlds:
The five planets — WASP-17b, HD209458b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b and XO-1b — orbit nearby stars. The strengths of their water signatures varied. WASP-17b, a planet with an especially puffed-up atmosphere, and HD209458b had the strongest signals. The signatures for the [...]
Nature gets the lowdown on the anatomical secret behind the koala’s deep, deep voice:
Benjamin Charlton, a biologist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, wanted to know what gave these marsupial Barry Whites their rumbling bass voice. “The first time I heard a koala bellow, I was genuinely amazed that an animal this small could produce such [...]
Mashable looks to the skies at Amazon’s latest innovation in delivery – a fleet of flying robots bringing YOUR Christmas present:
A video of how the service will work has already been posted to YouTube, showing the process of the package being taken from the warehouse floor and on to the front steps of the customer’s home. The idea is [...]
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