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.

Additionally any of these islands come with the knowledge that your tax paying pennies have been spend wisely because scientists have discovered new, so far undiscovered, islands. A whopping 657. Generally it concerns barrier islands though, not habitable mountains of sand.

Barrier islands often form as chains of long, low, narrow offshore deposits of sand and sediment, running parallel to a coast but separated from it by bays, estuaries or lagoons. Unlike stationary landforms, barrier islands build up, erode, migrate and rebuild over time in response to waves, tides, currents and other physical processes in the open ocean environment.

Scientists who previously slept at work are know to take care of the important things in life such as the ultimate pancake recipe, admit that these isles aren’t new but were overlooked during the last survey.

The newly identified barrier islands didn’t miraculously appear in the last decade, said study team member Matthew L. Stutz of Meredith. They’ve long existed but were overlooked or misclassified in past surveys.

While some of you might be interested in the article, I now am going to become a scientist and scour Google Earth in order to find my own private island because after all that I can not imagine that the scientists have not overlooked some more islands.

Photo credit: Nixter on Flickr.

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!

Click to enlarge.

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.

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 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.

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.

Photo credit: Koen van Gorp (Yes, he’s Belgian and has no paid hosting!) [via NASA]

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.

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.

Jetzer’s team first conducted a simulation of microlensing events in the Andromeda galaxy, which is more than 2 million light years away from Earth. Once they had determined the clues that a planet in Andromeda would show, they returned to a survey completed in 2004 … that showed an unusual light curve. That event, the group says, matches up to its theory and can be attributed to a companion of a mass about six times that of Jupiter. That suggests either a planet, or a small companion star such as a brown dwarf…. “The interesting thing is that the technology is in place to truly see planets of Jupiter’s mass and even less in other galaxies…. It’s an exceptional thing”, says study coauthor Francesco De Paolis.

Source: Discover Magazine.

Common sense dictates that larger raindrops should fall to the ground faster than smaller ones because they weigh more and can better overcome wind resistance. But anecdotal meteorology data have shown that when drops land, smaller ones are sometimes going just as fast as the biggest ones.

Analysis of around 64.000 raindrops in new Mexico has shown that the smaller raindrops defeat the speed of velocity:

Like the speed of light, the terminal velocity should be an absolute limit. But in a paper in press at Geophysical Research Letters, the team reports many observations of so-called superterminal drops, which form when larger drops collide and break up into bunches of small drops. Those smaller drops can then travel for a time as fast as the larger drops. For example, drops with a diameter of 100 micrometers are supposed to be limited to a terminal velocity of about 30 centimeters per second. But the researchers observed such drops hitting the ground at 3 to 4 meters per second.

Via ScienceNOW.

While condoms are meant to be compatible with water-based lubricants, they should not be completely submerged in water. Condom companies don’t test their products in such a condition, and therefore can’t vouch for their effectiveness when used in pools, hot tubs or other wet and wild setups.

But even for people in a monogamous relationship the conditions can be tricky:

You still might want to avoid water sex, as improperly maintained pools, hot tubs and Jacuzzis can be breeding grounds for bacteria. A study released last fall by Oregon State University found that summer is a bad time for bacterial infections in general, with serious infections caused by bacteria up as much as 17 percent with every 10-degree increase in seasonal air temperature.

I am not sure if the last mentioned danger is a risk or rather a bonus though:

A 2007 study conducted by the University of California, San Francisco, found that total body exposure to wet heat can impair both sperm production and motility. The study’s participants reported the use of a hot tub, heated Jacuzzi or bath at a temperature warmer than their body temperature for 30 minutes or more per week for at least three months prior to participation in the study.

Via LiveScience.