Happy Equinox
Hundreds of pictures of Earth, each taken at about 6AM , showing the terminator - the day/night line - over the course of one year (2010sep-2011sep).
Taken by METEOSAT-9 Earth-observing satellite.
Watch the Video here
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
Top 10 Biggest Brain Damaging Habits
1. No Breakfast
People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level.This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.
2. Overreacting
It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.
3. Smoking
It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.
4. High Sugar consumption
Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.
5. Air Pollution
The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.
6. Sleep Deprivation
Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain
7. Head covered while sleeping
Sleeping with the head covered, increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects.
8. Working your brain during illness
Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.
9. Talking Rarely
Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain.
10. Lacking in stimulating thoughts
Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.
20 Things You Didn’t Know About Fire
1 Fire is an event, not a thing. Heating wood or other fuel releases volatile vapors that can rapidly combust with oxygen in the air; the resulting incandescent bloom of gas further heats the fuel, releasing more vapors and perpetuating the cycle.
2 Most of the fuels we use derive their energy from trapped solar rays. In photosynthesis, sunlight and heat make chemical energy (in the form of wood or fossil fuel); fire uses chemical energy to produce light and heat.
3 So a bonfire is basically a tree running in reverse.
4 Assuming stable fuel, heat, and oxygen levels, a typical house fire will double in size every minute.
5 Earth is the only known planet where fire can burn. Everywhere else: Not enough oxygen.
6 Conversely, the more oxygen, the hotter the fire. Air is 21 percent oxygen; combine pure oxygen with acetylene, a chemical relative of methane, and you get an oxyacetylene welding torch that burns at over 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit—the hottest fire you are likely to encounter.
7 Oxygen supply influences the color of the flame. A low-oxygen fire contains lots of uncombusted fuel particles and will give off a yellow glow. A high-oxygen fire burns blue.
8 So candle flames are blue at the bottom because that’s where they take up fresh air, and yellow at the top because the rising fumes from below partly suffocate the upper part of the flame.
9 Fire makes water? It’s true. Place a cold spoon over a candle and you will observe the water vapor condense on the metal…
10 …because wax—like most organic materials, including wood and gasoline—contains hydrogen, which bonds with oxygen to make H2O when it burns. Water comes out your car’s tailpipe, too.
11 We’ve been at this a long time: Charred bones and wood ash indicate that early hominids were tending thefirst intentional fires more than 400,000 years ago.
12 Nature’s been at it awhile, too. A coal seam about 140 miles north of Sydney, Australia, has been burning by some estimates for 500,000 years.
13 The ancient Greeks started fire with concentrated sunlight. A parabolic mirror that focuses solar rays is still used to ignite the Olympic torch.
14 Every 52 years, when their calendar completed a cycle, the Aztecs would extinguish every flame in the empire. The high priest would start a new fire on the ripped-open chest of a sacrificial victim. Fires fed from this flame would be distributed throughout the land.
15 Good burn: The 1666 Great Fire of London destroyed 80 percent of the city but also ended an outbreak of bubonic plague that had killed more than 65,000 people the previous year. The fire fried the rats and fleas that carried Yersinia pestis, the plague-causing bacterium.
16 The Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin was the second deadliest blaze in United States history, taking 1,200 lives—four times as many as the Great Chicago Fire. Both conflagrations broke out on the same day: October 8, 1871.
17 America’s deadliest fire took place April 27, 1865, aboard the steamship Sultana. Among other passengers were 1,500 recently released Union prisoners traveling home up the Mississippi when the boilers exploded. The ship was six times over capacity, which helps explain the death toll of 1,547.
18 The Black Dragon Fire of 1987, the largest wildfire in modern times, burned some 20 million acres across China and the Soviet Union, an area about the size of South Carolina.
19 Spontaneous combustion is real. Some fuel sources can generate their own heat—by rotting, for instance. Pistachios have so much natural oil and are so prone to heat-generating fat decomposition that the International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code regards them as dangerous.
20 Haystacks, compost heaps, and even piles of old newspapers and magazines can also burst into flame. A good reason to recycle DISCOVER when you are done.
20 Things You Didn’t Know About Time
1 “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” joked Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists aren’t laughing, though. Some speculative new physics theories suggest that time emerges from a more fundamental—and timeless—reality.
2 Try explaining that when you get to work late. The average U.S. city commuter loses 38 hours a year to traffic delays.
3 Wonder why you have to set your clock ahead in March? Daylight Saving Time began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin, who proposed waking people earlier on bright summer mornings so they might work more during the day and thus save candles. It was introduced in the U.K. in 1917 and then spread around the world.
4 Green days. The Department of Energy estimates that electricity demand drops by 0.5 percent during Daylight Saving Time, saving the equivalent of nearly 3 million barrels of oil.
5 By observing how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked, and postal clerks spoke, psychologists determined that the three fastest-paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo, and New York.
6 The three slowest? Shreveport, Sacramento, and L.A.
7 One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milliseconds per century.
8 This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long.
9 Weather also changes the day. During El Niño events, strong winds can slow Earth’s rotation by a fraction of a millisecond every 24 hours.
10 Modern technology can do better. In 1972 a network of atomic clocks in more than 50 countries was made the final authority on time, so accurate that it takes 31.7 million years to lose about one second.
11 To keep this time in sync with Earth’s slowing rotation, a “leap second” must be added every few years, most recently this past New Year’s Eve.
12 The world’s most accurate clock, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, measures vibrations of a single atom of mercury. In a billion years it will not lose one second.
13 Until the 1800s, every village lived in its own little time zone, with clocks synchronized to the local solar noon.
14 This caused havoc with the advent of trains and timetables. For a while watches were made that could tell both local time and “railway time.”
15 On November 18, 1883, American railway companies forced the national adoption of standardized time zones.
16 Thinking about how railway time required clocks in different places to be synchronized may have inspiredEinstein to develop his theory of relativity, which unifies space and time.
17 Einstein showed that gravity makes time run more slowly. Thus airplane passengers, flying where Earth’s pull is weaker, age a few extra nanoseconds each flight.
18 According to quantum theory, the shortest moment of time that can exist is known as Planck time, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.
19 Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.
20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.
Sun’s Twin Discovered — the Perfect SETI Target?
There are 10 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are the same size as our sun. Therefore it should come as no surprise that astronomers have identified a clone to our sun lying only 200 light-years away.
Still, it is fascinating to imagine a yellow dwarf that is exactly the same mass, temperature and chemical composition as our nearest star. In a recent paper reporting on observations of the star — called HP 56948 — astronomer Jorge Melendez of the University of San Paulo, Brazil, calls it “the best solar twin known to date.”
![The most spectacular photograph of last weekend’s Lyrid meteor shower
It’s only fitting that one of the most breathtaking photographs of this weekend’s Lyrid meteor shower would be captured from the rim of Oregon’s Crater Lake.
Last weekend’s dark, moonless nights made for some of the best meteor-spotting conditions in close to a year — conditions astrophotographer Brad Goldpaint had planned to take full advantage of, had it not been for Oregon’s crummy weekend weather. He claims to have spotted just one meteor the entire night, but if the photograph up top is any indication [click here for higher res], it was definitely worth the wait. Besides, I’d imagine it’s pretty hard to be bummed about a lack of meteor activity when your default backdrop is an absurdly beautiful view of the Milky Way. [Brad Goldpaint via Bad Astronomy]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m348n5USzo1qbkzabo1_500.jpg)
The most spectacular photograph of last weekend’s Lyrid meteor shower
It’s only fitting that one of the most breathtaking photographs of this weekend’s Lyrid meteor shower would be captured from the rim of Oregon’s Crater Lake.
Last weekend’s dark, moonless nights made for some of the best meteor-spotting conditions in close to a year — conditions astrophotographer Brad Goldpaint had planned to take full advantage of, had it not been for Oregon’s crummy weekend weather. He claims to have spotted just one meteor the entire night, but if the photograph up top is any indication [click here for higher res], it was definitely worth the wait. Besides, I’d imagine it’s pretty hard to be bummed about a lack of meteor activity when your default backdrop is an absurdly beautiful view of the Milky Way. [Brad Goldpaint via Bad Astronomy]
![Chemical crayon labels teach kids chemistry while they color
Que Interesante [Etsy via Ian Brooks]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2jxj7PWRF1qbkzabo1_500.jpg)
Chemical crayon labels teach kids chemistry while they color
Que Interesante [Etsy via Ian Brooks]
Dazzling Photographs of Earth From Above
Satellite images of mountains, glaciers, deserts and other landscapes become incredible works of art
1. Van Gogh From Space (July 13, 2005)
The green and blue swirls of the Baltic Sea surrounding the Swedish island Gotland look like they could have been painted by Vincent van Gogh, but they are the work of microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton. When ocean currents bring an abundance of nutrients to the surface, the population of tiny plants proliferates into big, colorful blooms.
2. Lake Eyre (August 5, 2006)
The ghostly face is part of southern Australia’s Lake Eyre. The desert lake remains dry most of the year, filling during the rainy season. When the lake is completely full—which has only happened three times in the past 150 years—it is the largest lake on the continent.
3. Spilled Paint (February 10, 2003)
The various hues of this abstract scene represent the different landscapes present in Dasht-e Kavir, or the Great Salt Desert, of northern Iran. The sparsely populated desert is named after its many salt marshes (“kavir” means salt marsh in Persian). The Great Salt Desert is also home to dry streambeds, plateaus and mud flats, covering almost 30,000 square miles of the Iranian Plateau.
4. Icelandic Tiger (October 21, 1999)
Nature often inspires art, but sometimes it is art. For almost 40 years, the Landsat satellites have been snapping images of earth that look more like they belong on the walls of a modern art museum than stored in a scientific archive. The U.S. Geological Survey, which manages the satellite program with NASA, is sharing the beauty of these photos in its new “Earth as Art” exhibit on display at the Library of Congress through May 31, 2012.
Everyone at USGS who works with Landsat data has a favorite photo, and that led to the idea of gathering a collection of favorites to share with the public, says Ronald Beck, a USGS public information specialist who has worked with the Landsat Program for 37 years. Beck’s favorite in the new exhibit, the third installment of “Earth as Art,” is Icelandic Tiger. The “tiger” is part of Iceland’s northern coast, and its mouth is the fjord called Eyjafjorour, meaning “Island Fjord.” The name refers to the small island the tiger is about to eat.
(Source: smithsonianmag.com)
![This Is What the Death of a Star Really Looks Like
This is the best, the most detailed and clearest image of a dying star yet, according to NASA. Pause for a few seconds, expand the image, and really look at it. Imagine all that unstoppable fire in motion, like a real version of the Death Star explosion, but a gazillion times bigger.
Imagine the shockwave that shaped those huge balls of plasma in action. Imagine the roar you would never hear in space. It’s simply amazing—magnificent destruction.
Now look at it again and think about this: what you are seeing is not its end yet. This star—the larger sister in the Eta Carinae binary system—is only dying now. It’s not dead yet (or, at least, we haven’t seen its death yet). This is not its final song, just a last angry outburst that was first observed in the 19th century.
Very soon—in astronomical terms very soon may mean a million years—this incredible image will be nothing compared to what’s coming next. A real supernova of such proportions that it will shine much brighter than any other star in firmament.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys High Resolution Channel in the Hubble will not be around when this happens, but our descendants will hopefully be here and will be able to see it in much better detail. “Expect an impressive view from Earth,” says NASA.
I wish I could stay here that long. [NASA Goddard Flickr]
Republished from http://gizmodo.com](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1sqvgY5cl1qbkzabo1_500.jpg)
This Is What the Death of a Star Really Looks Like
This is the best, the most detailed and clearest image of a dying star yet, according to NASA. Pause for a few seconds, expand the image, and really look at it. Imagine all that unstoppable fire in motion, like a real version of the Death Star explosion, but a gazillion times bigger.
Imagine the shockwave that shaped those huge balls of plasma in action. Imagine the roar you would never hear in space. It’s simply amazing—magnificent destruction.
Now look at it again and think about this: what you are seeing is not its end yet. This star—the larger sister in the Eta Carinae binary system—is only dying now. It’s not dead yet (or, at least, we haven’t seen its death yet). This is not its final song, just a last angry outburst that was first observed in the 19th century.
Very soon—in astronomical terms very soon may mean a million years—this incredible image will be nothing compared to what’s coming next. A real supernova of such proportions that it will shine much brighter than any other star in firmament.
The Advanced Camera for Surveys High Resolution Channel in the Hubble will not be around when this happens, but our descendants will hopefully be here and will be able to see it in much better detail. “Expect an impressive view from Earth,” says NASA.
I wish I could stay here that long. [NASA Goddard Flickr]
Republished from http://gizmodo.com
