Your own private island?
If after tax day you still have some pennies left over, and after you’ve already reserved this absolutely awesome amplifier, today might be your day. Your day to wisely spend those pennies and get your own private island. Or 657 islands. Read more
Our friend Hubble. No newcomer here at Frankylicious. So yeah… Hubble did it again. After the awesome pictures from Hubble we have gotten used to this time a new furthest galaxy has been found.
1.3 Billion light years away. Even at warp speed 9 it will take you more than 800.000 years to reach this new found Galaxy but for Hubble not a problem. Don’t believe me? Check it out yourself!
If you have problems locating this galaxy the next picture should help but once you reach Jupiter it’s the second at the left. Straight ahead after that. Watch out you silly, you almost got hit by a rock there! Read more
The infographic released by us at Infographiclabs is a real trip down memory lane for nerds and internet lovers united.
David Galbraith studied the population of Rome over the last 3000 years. Interesting discoveries:
the rise and fall of Ancient Rome was roughly symmetrical (compared to the rapid decline of societies such as Greenland in Jared Diamond’s ‘Collapse’); the population during the Renaissance was miniscule (yet it was still a global center), when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel it was considerably smaller than a town like Palo Alto is today (60K); Rome at its nadir was about the size of Google (20K employees); the growth of Rome during the Industrial era is much greater than the rise of Ancient Rome.
Go look at the nice graph here.
A new paper published by the German Federal Environment Agency has warned for possible dangers from nanotechnology. The German internet immediately inflated the warning and the nanodanger became humongous in the rumour kitchen.
Yet some studies have emerged that do appear to show nano-sized ingredients can be harmful. One, from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in the United Kingdom, found that when mice inhaled carbon nano-tubes, they developed lung inflammations similar to those caused by asbestos. The lung inflammations did eventually subside. Another theory posits that nano-materials could have an impact on human DNA and more science-fiction-style scenarios involve the deadly military potential of items like the flexible amour and lightweight combat equipment being developed at Florida State University in the United States.
Read more at Spiegel International.
It’s pretty much the same story as with the Church needing 500 years to accept Galileo’s theory, but the other way round and without the church involved this time. Which won’t last long of course. Especially not if the topic is as serious as it is.
It could be that time is out of joint!
Everything from the concept of the black hole to GPS timing owes a debt to the theory of general relativity, which describes how gravity arises from the geometry of space and time. The sun’s gravitational field, for instance, bends starlight passing nearby because its mass is warping the surrounding space-time. This theory has held up to precision tests in the solar system and beyond, and has explained everything from the odd orbit of Mercury to the way pairs of neutron stars perform their pas de deux.
Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence is far from watertight, if confirmed by bigger surveys, it may indicate either that Einstein’s theory is incomplete, or else that dark energy, the stuff thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe, is much weirder than we thought
Continue reading at The New Scientist.
Two German professors at the Uni of Koblenz claim having discovered the possibility to travel faster than the speed of light. But there could be some problems with their quantum tunneling theory;
The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons – energetic packets of light – travelled “instantaneously” between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.
Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide variety of bizarre consequences.
For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving
We are not sure if this announcement is truly exciting or not but it contains the word quantum, so we had to report it here.
Source: The Telegraph.
This photo was taken during last week’s longest sun eclipse. You won’t see a better one until the next eclipse of the sun.
Photo credit: Koen van Gorp (Yes, he’s Belgian and has no paid hosting!) [via NASA]
Cool facts published by the BBC.
The Venus flytrap closes around an insect in just 0.3s or faster, while the waterwheel use thin translucent traps to snare copepods and other aquatic invertebrates.
Charles Darwin was so enamoured by this striking adaptation, and the speed with which it works, that he described the Venus flytrap as being “one of the most wonderful plants in the world.”
“Darwin was fascinated by carnivorous plants in general and the Venus flytrap in particular, I think, partly because they go against type,” says Don Waller, a botanist at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, US.
“In his time and ours, most of us feel that plants are passive, harmless, and can’t move. But the Venus flytrap acts like an animal, it moves fast and eats fresh meat.
Source: BBC.
The evolution with trains could be very interesting in the next years. Levitating trains are a very interesting concept and in the past scientist have already uttered the possibility of high speed Maglev trains crossing the Altantic much faster than the Concorde did.
A 4,000-mph magnetically levitated train could allow you to have lunch in Manhattan and still get to London in time for the theater, despite the 5-hour time difference. It’s not impossible: Norway has studied neutrally buoyant tunnels (concluding that they’re feasible, though expensive), and Shanghai is running maglev trains to its airport. But supersonic speeds require another critical step: eliminating the air — and therefore air friction — from the train’s path. A vacuum would also save the tunnel from the destructive effects of a sonic boom, which, unchecked, could potentially rip the tunnel apart.
This video of a toy Maglev train shows the amazing technology we will maybe adapt over the next years.
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Geekiness with Attitude
