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POPSFree Lectures and Courses... This was clipped some time ago by someone to whom I add thanks. Newer clippers may find it interesting. I've detailed the astronomy items as that is what I was searching for.
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POPSPhysicist unlocking the mysteries of neighboring galaxies "...Our observations also suggest that the Triangulum Galaxy is being ripped apart by Andromeda." Andromeda, and our own galaxy the Milky Way, are the two largest members of a small cluster of galaxies known as the Local Group. Triangulum, the third largest member of the Local Group, is about one-tenth the size of Andromeda. "Within a few billion years Triangulum will be completely destroyed by Andromeda and its stars will be dispersed throughout the Andromeda halo," says Dr. Widrow. "And a few billion years after that, Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide and merge together to form a giant elliptical galaxy."
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POPS"Milky Way may have a huge hidden neighbour" more (at source): Right now, says Chakrabarti, the galaxy is roughly 300,000 light years away from us - about twice as far away as the LMC. But the simulations suggest it follows a highly elongated elliptical path, and about 300 million years ago it swept through our own galaxy just 16,000 light years from the galactic centre - closer in than Earth - disturbing the Milky Way's outskirts as it went. "Overall, it is a very plausible scenario," says Abraham Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was not part of the study. "Of course, the fact that we don't see such a massive satellite is an issue."
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POPSThe Genesis of Bill Nye "We teabagger-Americans have put up with a lot--jokes about grenade sucking, comments about the intelligence of someone who supports Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, homosexual teletubbies, sushi--but, by God, we don't need no fancy Seattle science guy coming down to our national homeland, The Republic of Texas, and tellin' us the moon ain't Jesus' light bulb."
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POPSFinding Twin Earths: Harder Than We Thought! For more information, contact: David A. Aguilar Director of Public Affairs Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 617-495-7462 daguilar@cfa.harvard.edu Christine Pulliam Public Affairs Specialist Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 617-495-7463 cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu
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POPSNumbers in the News "The number itself is incomprehensible by human minds, and can only be theoretically understood in a fractional parallel universe which we refer to as the DC dimension," said Brossard. "The best way to understand a stimulus is to imagine a dollar sign followed by a packed string of hexidecimal nanodigits, wound into a triple helix, woven into a dodecahedron, and stacked on top of one another. Now imagine you were a black hole on the far edge of the universe, trying to escape the stimulus at 30 times the speed of light. The stimulus would still catch up to you and ram your black hole with such furious, repeated force that it would cause your entire reality itself to collapse." "The exciting news is that with more powerful computers and drugs, we believe we are on the verge of discovering an even larger number, which we refer to as a 'stimulusconferencebill,'" said Xiao. "Speaker Pelosi has already promised us the funding."
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POPSMystery roar detected from far, far, away continues: There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission). In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space. ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe. "The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."
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POPSA Diamond Bigger than Earth Discovered The diamond is actually the crystallized interior of a white dwarf – or the hot core of a star that is left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.
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POPSShedding Light on Dark Matter Dark matter and dark energy have often gotten a bum rap. They have been accused of everything from altering cellular structure*, to speeding the expansion of the universe. I think further investigation is needed before we sully Dark Matter's good name. *X-Files "Soft Light" Second Season
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POPSTime to test time Yet if Hogan's ideas are right, noise associated with this fundamental fuzziness should be prominent at GEO600, a joint British and German machine operating near Hannover, Germany, that is searching for gravitational waves. These waves are thought to arise during events such as the massive cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Confirmation of the idea — which could come as experimental upgrades to GEO600 are put in place over the coming year — would be a big step towards a verifiable quantum theory of gravity, a long-sought unification of quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) with general relativity (the physics of the very big). Hogan outlines his predictions in a paper published on 30 October in Physical Review D1.
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POPSSave The Whales Trapped In Arctic Ice For example this emailer identifying herself as Pamela Lewis, who claims a scientific background: Dear Sir: I have a degree in astrophysics. I suggest that you spend money and go to Greenland, the North Pole and Antarctica and see the climate change for yourself. Instead you degrade scientists and don't care about the future of this country. I feel sorry for you and your lack of knowledge. Instead you rather destroy your childrens' future and this planet's future. If you believe in God, shame on you for not taking care of this planet. You would rather see it destroyed. I believe in God and believe in saving the planet as the Lord said we are keepers of this planet. If you don't then you must believe in greed, hatred and hostile racism towards President Elect Obama. Grow up and do scientific studies yourself. Hat tip: Bruce Thompson
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POPSTime to test time “If it's true, it's Nobel-prize-winning stuff” Karsten Danzmann Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
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