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POPSStarCAVE A 3-D Virtual Reality Environment The StarCAVE,developed at UC San Diego, is a virtual reality (VR) room where scientific models and animations are projected in stereo on 360-degree screens surrounding the viewer, and onto the floor as well.
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POPSMapping the Bio Cosmos Microbes are responsible for many biogeochemical cycles and are crucial to the continued function of the , Woese's efforts to clarify the evolution and diversity of microbes provided an invaluable service to ecologists and conservationists. Woese’s big idea is that primitive life existed as a community of cells that freely exchanged genes. They shared a basic translation system for making proteins, but had little else in common. These cells evolved as a community and not as distinct lineages. Before Woese, the tree of life had two main branches called prokaryotes and eukaryotes, the prokaryotes composed of cells without nuclei and the eukaryotes composed of cells with nuclei.
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POPSAtomic Prose "On the whole, the best writing about physics for a general audience seems to come from physicists, not journalists. This isn't due to the fact that physicists understand the subject matter better—if anything, people who spend all day in the lab are often the worst at explaining the big picture. Rather, they're better at writing about physics because they don't try so hard to make you care. They don't believe their readers must be seduced with colorful wordplay or end-of-the-world melodramas. Journalists writing popular treatments of subatomic physics could take a lesson from the scientists: Tell it straight and have a little faith that the subject matter itself—a major advance in our understanding of the cosmos—can generate its own wonder and excitement".
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POPSMysterious New 'Dark Flow' Discovered in Space They discovered that the clusters were moving nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million kph) toward a region in the sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. This motion is different from the outward expansion of the universe (which is accelerated by the force called dark energy).
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POPSA Celestial Journey This is a "journey" throughout the cosmos, showing nebulae, galaxies, supernovas, stars and space clouds. The photos are provided by NASA . Acompaniying this video are the songs by Aeoliah : "Whispers Among The Stars" , "The Journey Home" and "Crystal Illumination" ; by Herb Ernst: "Celestial Ascent" and Deuter: "Waves Of Light" .
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POPSTuamatuan conceptions of the cosmos by Paiore "Tuamotuan Conception of the Cosmos", by Paiore (1820). This diagram first appeared in the writings of Rev. Pere Herve Audran, a missionary. In December 1919, during the course of research on her Ph.D. dissertation, Margaret Mead saw this illustration in the Journal of the Polynesian Society. Later, in 1924, she resolved to do ethnological fieldwork in the remote Tuamotu islands of central Polynesia. See Freeman (1991) “There’s Tricks I’ th’ World,” Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 7(1).
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POPSCosmic crash unmasks dark matter It looks as if it is being seen through lots of little lenses. And each of these lenses represents a piece of dark matter. Astronomers used the Chandra X-ray telescope to map ordinary matter in the merging clusters, mostly in the form of hot gas, which glows brightly in X-rays. As the two clusters that formed MACSJ0025 merged at speeds of millions of kilometres per hour, hot gas in the two clusters collided and slowed down. However, the dark matter kept on going, passing right through the smash-up. The latest astronomical observations suggest that dark matter makes up some 23% of the Universe. Ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4%. The remaining 73% is made up of another mysterious quantity; dark energy, which is responsible for speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.
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POPSThou art that--Alan Watts (thanks to Cathy E. in LJ...Watts continues: If you go out at night and look at the stars you will realize that they are millions and millions and billions of miles away - vast configurations out in space! You can lie back and look at that and say, "Whew! Surely I hardly matter. I am just a tiny little peek-a-boo on this weird spot of dust called Earth, and all that out there was going on billions of years before I was born, and will still go on billions of years after I die." Nothing may seem stranger to you than that - more different than you. But there comes a point when you will say, "Why, that's me!" And when you know that, you never die."
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POPSScience, faith and everyday miracles "An Einstein letter that sold at an auction in May leaves little doubt of his atheism. "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish," he wrote in 1954, a year before his death." "And yet Einstein is famous for a number of teasingly "spiritual" quotations - "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos," for one - that suggest he is a theist. A growing body of Einsteinologists believes the physicist was using such God language metaphorically to express a human impulse for finding meaning and comfort in the clock-like workings of the universe. As he wrote in 1931:"
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POPSMassive Radio-telescope in China to Explore 'Dark Age' of Early Universe The new study is part of a broader effort to understand the early years of the universe, after the big bang using computer simulations can help scientists understand events like the birth of the first stars in the universe. During much of the universe's first billion years, the awesome brilliance born of the big bang faded to black. This dark age represents the least-understood chapter in the history of the cosmos scientists have compiled.
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