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muslim world posted a photo:
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muslim world posted a photo:
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muslim world posted a photo:
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It's the first time for a solar-powered plane to circumnavigate the globe. Now it's en route to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates — and you can watch the journey in a live video from the cockpit.
BBC2's revival feeds the appetite for nostalgia TV and our growing love of tech
BBC2 viewers keen on a bit of wanton four-wheel destruction at the hands of a bunch of whooping middle-aged men need no longer mourn the passing of Jeremy Clarkson's Top Gear.
The return of Robot Wars, back on Sunday night, is perfectly timed to fill the void of the Top Gear slot, not least after the travails of the motoring show's short-lived Chris Evans incarnation.
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This was a pretty good week for all but VHS enthusiasts. NASA tested a new lightweight rocket material. The Kepler space telescope found a couple of potentially habitable exoplanets. Researchers built a robot out of a sea slug. And scientists at TU D... Zed.Cat posted a photo:
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The Earth is adrift in a sea of mystery particles, which we would like to see. The LUX experiment, our most sensitive eye, has just reported back. What have we learned?
We know that billions of unseen particles pass through us every moment. We are bathed in neutrinos from the Sun, and in low-energy photons left over from the Big Bang. Both types of particle are vital ingredients in our understanding of physics and the universe, and both have been measured eventually by highly specialised detectors.
But there's more. Or at least we think there is. The way galaxies move, and the way light bends as it travels to us across space from far distant clusters, indicate that there is more material there than we can see. We call it “dark matter”, though as Lisa Randall says in her recent book, it might better be called “transparent matter”, since apart from the slight bending caused by gravity, light passes right through it.
Related: Light and Dark Matter in Durham | Life & Physics
In important ways, the significance of a null result depends upon a robust theoretical framework
We've probed previously unexplored regions of parameter space with the aim of making the first definitive discovery of dark matter. Though a positive signal would have been welcome, nature was not so kind! Nonetheless, a null result is significant as it changes the landscape of the field by constraining models for what dark matter could be beyond anything that existed previously
Related: Second gravitational wave detected from ancient black hole collision
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NASA's Kepler Mission found stars that resemble our sun about a few million years after its birth. The Kepler data showed many examples of what are called “superflares” enormous explosions so rare today that we only experience them once every 100 years or so. Yet the Kepler data also show these youngsters producing as many as ten superflares a day.
“Early Earth received only about 70 percent of the energy from the sun than it does today,” said Vladimir Airapetian, a solar scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. “That means Earth should have been an icy ball. Instead, geological evidence says it was a warm globe with liquid water. We call this the Faint Young Sun Paradox. Our research shows that solar storms could have been central to warming Earth.”
Our sun's adolescence was stormy—and new evidence shows that these tempests may have been just the key to seeding life as we know it. Some 4 billion years ago, the sun shone with only about three-quarters the brightness we see today, but its surface roiled with giant eruptions spewing enormous amounts of solar material and radiation out into space. These powerful solar explosions may have provided the crucial energy needed to warm Earth, despite the sun's faintness.The eruptions also may have furnished the energy needed to turn simple molecules into the complex molecules such as RNA and DNA that were necessary for life.
Understanding what conditions were necessary for life on our planet helps us both trace the origins of life on Earth and guide the search for life on other planets. Until now, however, fully mapping Earth's evolution has been hindered by the simple fact that the young sun wasn't luminous enough to warm Earth.
Scientists are able to piece together the history of the sun by searching for similar stars in our galaxy. By placing these sun-like stars in order according to their age, the stars appear as a functional timeline of how our own sun evolved. It is from this kind of data that scientists know the sun was fainter 4 billion years ago. Such studies also show that young stars frequently produce powerful flares giant bursts of light and radiation — similar to the flares we see on our own sun today. Such flares are often accompanied by huge clouds of solar material, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, which erupt out into space.
While our sun still produces flares and CMEs, they are not so frequent or intense. What's more, Earth today has a strong magnetic field that helps keep the bulk of the energy from such space weather from reaching Earth. Space weather can, however, significantly disturb a magnetic bubble around our planet, the magnetosphere, a phenomenon referred to as geomagnetic storms that can affect radio communications and our satellites in space. It also creates auroras most often in a narrow region near the poles where Earth's magnetic fields bow down to touch the planet.
Our young Earth, however, had a weaker magnetic field, with a much wider footprint near the poles. “Our calculations show that you would have regularly seen auroras all the way down in South Carolina,” says Airapetian, lead author of the paper. “And as the particles from the space weather traveled down the magnetic field lines, they would have slammed into abundant nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere. Changing the atmosphere's chemistry turns out to have made all the difference for life on Earth.”
The atmosphere of early Earth was also different than it is now: Molecular nitrogen that is, two nitrogen atoms bound together into a molecule made up 90 percent of the atmosphere, compared to only 78 percent today. As energetic particles slammed into these nitrogen molecules, the impact broke them up into individual nitrogen atoms. They, in turn, collided with carbon dioxide, separating those molecules into carbon monoxide and oxygen.
The free-floating nitrogen and oxygen combined into nitrous oxide, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. When it comes to warming the atmosphere, nitrous oxide is some 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The teams' calculations show that if the early atmosphere housed less than one percent as much nitrous oxide as it did carbon dioxide, it would warm the planet enough for liquid water to exist.
This newly discovered constant influx of solar particles to early Earth may have done more than just warm the atmosphere, it may also have provided the energy needed to make complex chemicals. In a planet scattered evenly with simple molecules, it takes a huge amount of incoming energy to create the complex molecules such as RNA and DNA that eventually seeded life.
While enough energy appears to be hugely important for a growing planet, too much would also be an issue — a constant chain of solar eruptions producing showers of particle radiation can be quite detrimental. Such an onslaught of magnetic clouds can rip off a planet's atmosphere if the magnetosphere is too weak. Understanding these kinds of balances help scientists determine what kinds of stars and what kinds of planets could be hospitable for life.
“We want to gather all this information together, how close a planet is to the star, how energetic the star is, how strong the planet's magnetosphere is in order to help search for habitable planets around stars near our own and throughout the galaxy,” said William Danchi, principal investigator of the project at Goddard and a co-author on the paper. “This work includes scientists from many fields — those who study the sun, the stars, the planets, chemistry and biology. Working together we can create a robust description of what the early days of our home planet looked like and where life might exist elsewhere.”
This research was published in Nature Geoscience on May 23, 2016, by a team of scientists from NASA.
Weekend Feature
The Daily Galaxy via NASA and http://www.astrobio.net
Image credit: NASA/SDO
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The sun emitted three mid-level solar flares on July 22-23, 2016, the strongest peaking at 1:16 am EDT on July 23. The sun is currently in a period of low activity, moving toward what's called solar minimum when there are few to no solar eruptions so these flares were the first large ones observed since April. They are categorized as mid-strength flares, substantially less intense than the most powerful solar flares.
These flares were classified as M-level flares. M-class flares are the category just below the most intense flares, X-class flares. The number provides more information about its strength. An M2 is twice as intense as an M1, an M3 is three times as intense, etc.
Of these three flares: The first was an M5.0, which peaked at 10:11 pm EDT on July 22, 2016. The second -- the strongest -- was an M7.6, which peaked at 1:16 am EDT on July 23. The final was an M5.5, which peaked 15 minutes later at 1:31 am EDT.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/SDO
They were rivals who shaped American architecture, but to call them an ‘odd couple' overstates their relationship
Frank Lloyd Wright was a true original creator of buildings both flawed and brilliant, a devout believer in his own genius, nature-loving, midwestern, New-York-hating who sought to realise an American pioneer spirit, one that broke with the old world of classical columns and pediments. He would speak with quasi-biblical language about the truths he claimed for his life and architecture. He was, arguably, America's greatest architect.
Philip Johnson was perhaps most at home at his table in the Four Seasons restaurant off Park Avenue, a space of sophistication and great cost created to his designs. He was urbane, Europhile, plagiaristic, fascinated with the superficial, a self-confessed “whore”, sociable, political, an operator both Machiavellian and Mephistophelean. He was a mostly terrible architect, who nonetheless managed to create or assist in some of the most influential buildings of 20th-century America. The critic Paul Goldberger called him “the greatest architectural presence of our time”, which was roughly right a presence rather than an actual architect.
Continue reading...Blue-sky thinking results in contrasting but equally ingenious projects to replace two piers on the Sussex coast
The burning pier is a rite of the British seaside, occasional, unscheduled but persistent, whereby bored teenage arsonists or seekers-after-insurance-claims or pure accidents spark conflagrations of teetering Victorian structures which, despite being made of iron and placed over the sea, burn merrily. It turns out that the wooden shack-like buildings on top, plus timber decking, are enough to fuel the blaze; conventionally equipped fire brigades can't get to the end to put it out. So residents and consumers of news are treated to the pagan spectacle of fire over water on a grand scale.
Sometimes they burn more than once for example Hastings Pier in 1917 and 2010, and the West Pier in Brighton in March and May 2003. Then follows the less exciting sight of attempts at resurrection. The 19th-century business models that got them built no longer work. The damaged historic metalwork can be astoundingly expensive to restore. The ownership might be opaque. What's left rots. It becomes a handy symbol of bygone halcyon days.
The pier enables you, undistracted by clutter, to inhale the experience the view, the light, the air
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Blue Pond in Biei, Hokkaido, Japan (© JTB Photo/UIG/Getty Images) 2016-07-23 [www.bing.com/search] National Portrait Gallery, London
There's more to Eggleston's everyday, extraordinary, infinitely various photographs of American life in the 60s and 70s than he would have us believe, as this captivating show reveals
There is a magnificent photograph by William Eggleston of a teenage boy framed in a shaft of evening sunlight. He appears in profile, leaning forward about an arm's length from the camera. The sun gilds his strong forearm, which pushes forward like a runner, and caresses his handsome face, turning his quiff into a red-golden blaze. On the wall behind him the whole pose is confirmed in shadow the golden boy as heroic silhouette.
Except that this is not a pose. It takes a moment or two to notice that the boy is not standing but moving and that his forearm is resting at right angles on a supermarket trolley. He is returning a queue of trolleys, in fact, to the shop. An ordinary scene is made extraordinary by perfectly natural light, and the worker is singled out as much by that light as by the camera. The image is almost romantic, but just held back.
The maid making the bed is not just anyone but the woman who looked after Eggleston when he was growing up
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Ulrik Heltoft: 8 Films and handful of questions
Published by Revolver Publishing and Space Poetry
Concept: Ulrik Heltoft with Claus Due
Graphic design: Claus Due, Designbolaget with Isabel Seiffert
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Steven Parrino - Creeping eye, 1993
The Royal Academy of Arts is to launch a groundbreaking experiment designed to give visitors the unsettling opportunity to see themselves as they really are.
The London gallery is to install cutting-edge technology in September as part of an interactive experiment using the Veronica Chorographic Scanner, which can capture every pore and pimple as well as more positive attributes in a 3D “sculpture”.
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After the convention, many Republicans are worried that Trumpism does not respect the prudent, cautious, free-market conservatism they value. Trump is turning his back on decades of Republican Party doctrine and, for millennials especially, making the Republican Party a "toxic brand."![]("http://chimpfeedr.com/img/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2F%7Er%2Fnybooks%2F%7E4%2F3vQPwQnoZuM&width=540&mix=42dfe-culture")
A marvellously melancholic motion-capture performance by Mark Rylance and vibrant support from rising star Ruby Barnhill provide the beating heart of this extremely likable adaptation of Roald Dahl's family favourite, which also owes a debt to the illustrations of Quentin Blake. Brimful of the anarchic magic so sorely missing from Spielberg's ill-fated Peter Pan project, Hook, The BFG sees the director rediscovering his inner child in winning fashion. Like the eponymous figure, the result may be a little lumbering at times, but it is also ultimately irresistible.
We open in a Mary Poppins-style version of London where past and present seem to intermingle. From vistas of the Thames and the Houses of Parliament we move through Dickensian cobbled streets to the orphanage where young Sophie (Barnhill) peers like a giant into the tiny rooms of a doll's house. It's the witching hour, and Spielbergian shafts of dusty moonlight stream through the room (the “silver blade” of Dahl's source) whence Sophie herself will soon be taken, to Giant Country, where beasts with names like Bloodbottler and Fleshlumpeater are hungry for “human beans”.
At the palace, the BFG introduces the Queen to 'whizzpopping', the bottom-burping 'sign of true happiness'
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