There’s so much we can do with money: spend it, save it, invest it, give it to those in need. Then again, some people go beyond the obvious. They turn their bills money into money origami, grafitti or other “art†pieces.
Others are even more creative: they pose with money to create images that are only half human. The results are fascinating and quite entertaining. Who said that money topics have to be boring?
Do you know what's great about running for the U.S. Senate? You learn all kinds of stuff about the country. Like, did you know that there's a First Amendment? Apparently, it's right there just before the Second Amendment. Who knew?
"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked [her opponent Chris Coons during a debate]. When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"
Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience. "You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp," Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O'Donnell's grasp of the Constitution.
It's true! I checked! And that's not all; there's all kinds of crazy shit in this thing. Like, did you know that you're not allowed to keep slaves. What?! When did this happen? Why did this not show up in my Twitter feed?
Oh, and apparently, we're not allowed to drink alcohol. Of all the fu– Wait, never mind. Yes, we can. Crisis averted, people. Crisis averted.
Update: Politico has some extremely Yikes!y audio from the debate.
The Earth was pummeled with record-setting levels of cosmic rays in 2009. Measurements from NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and other spacecraft found that more high-energy particles from galactic space penetrated the inner solar system in the last few years than at any other time since the beginning of the space age.
The spike is almost certainly due to several weird aspects of the most recent solar minimum, and could be the start of a new normal for cosmic ray levels.
“It’s sort of like everything’s working in the same direction right now, to allow cosmic rays greater access to the inner solar system,†said space scientist Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. Mewaldt and colleagues published their findings Oct. 7 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Cosmic rays, high-energy particles that originate in the galaxy and smack into Earth from all directions at near-light speeds, can pose a danger to spacecraft and astronauts spending long periods of time outside the Earth’s protective magnetic field. Most of these particles, especially the less-energetic ones, are deflected by the solar wind, which blows a protective bubble around the solar system called the heliosphere.
This solar system shield fluctuates in effectiveness every 11 years, as the sun goes through its regular cycle from lots of sunspots and solar flares to relatively boring solar weather. When the sun is most active, the solar wind is strongest, and even fewer cosmic rays penetrate the barriers. At solar minimum, more cosmic rays make it through.
“Up until now they had been reaching a constant level each solar minimum,†Mewaldt said. “But this one was different. This cycle, they’re more intense than they were in the past.â€
The most recent solar minimum started in 2006 and was expected to end in 2008, but the sun stayed quiet through 2010. Using data from the ACE spacecraft, which has been in orbit around the sun since 1997, and historical data from a series of short-lived spacecraft going back to 1965, Mewaldt and colleagues showed that the cosmic ray levels in 2009 were 20 to 26 percent greater than at any previous solar minimum.
There are three main reasons for the upswing in cosmic rays, Mewaldt said. The solar magnetic field has been weaker than usual, which means the magnetic field that permeates the solar system is weaker too, and less efficient at knocking cosmic rays aside.
The long years of low solar activity also contribute to the high cosmic ray numbers. The sun occasionally lets off enormous bursts of plasma called coronal mass ejections, which can block cosmic rays as they explode out into interplanetary space. But there were fewer of these bursts during the most recent solar minimum, and those that happened were smaller than usual. “That’s another thing that let down the barriers and let the cosmic rays come in easier,†Mewaldt said.
Finally, the constant stream of charged particles that makes up the solar wind is weaker, making the protective bubble of the heliosphere smaller and more permeable. Incoming cosmic rays have a shorter distance to go to reach the Earth, so wimpier particles that would normally never get here can now make the journey.
Astronomers have already seen the impact of these extra cosmic rays on spacecraft, which have shown a 25 percent increase in certain types of errors that result from cosmic ray strikes, Mewaldt says.
The increased cosmic rays could pose a bigger problem for astronauts heading to Mars or building a base on the moon.
“They’d feel the brunt of this radiation for a longer period,†Mewaldt said “It’s already a problem, this would just make it worse.â€
Although cosmic ray levels started going back down in early 2010, Mewaldt thinks the new high could be part of the long-term pattern of the sun. Measurements of radioactive elements embedded in ice cores at the poles show that over the past 500 years, cosmic ray levels were 40 to 80 percent higher than in the early 1970s. That means the sun was quieter in the past than it has been in the last few decades.
“It could well be that we are going to one of these longer-term grand minima,†Mewaldt said. “We don’t know yet for sure if we’re starting into one of those periods, but it certainly looks possible. We’ll have to wait a little longer to say.â€
“I believe that this paper is the first paper that really shows us how the heliosphere works as a big global system,†commented NASA astronomer William D. Pesnell. “I think it will become an important paper because of that.â€
Image: NASA
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Peter Kafka at All Things Digital thinks that Steve Jobs might want to buy Facebook. His reasoning is that Jobs, when asked what Apple plans to do with its now $51 billion in cash, said, "We firmly believe that one or more unique strategic opportunities will present itself to us, and we'll be in a position to take advantage of it." Kafka believes that one such "unique strategic" opportunity is called Facebook.
Jobs and Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg met for dinner the other day. Many presumed that they were discussing Facebook Connect and Ping integration, but what if it were something more, like Apple buying Facebook? Kafka thinks that Apple acquiring Facebook makes sense because Facebook doesn't compete with Apple in any significant way, and Facebook is something that Apple couldn't compete against even if it wanted to. Plus, Facebook is already competing with Google, "which has to make Jobs like it even more," Kafka argues.
What would Apple buying Facebook lead to? Every Facebook user would probably automatically have an iTunes Store account. FaceTime chat could be integrated into Facebook chat, potentially leading to increased sales of iOS devices. If Apple continues down the road of using not only phone numbers, but email addresses and eventually Facebook IDs as designated FaceTime "phone numbers," then 500 million users would already have a FaceTime ID to use when all telephony goes VoIP.
Apple has the cash to buy Facebook outright (Facebook is valued at around US $25-35 billion), but will they? Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg seem to share a lot of traits (not to mention both having had movies made about them), but could two of the most powerful people in tech -- with equally powerful egos -- work together?
Does Apple want to buy Facebook? originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
A university professor in Sweden has "hope for humanity" after the thief who stole his laptop backed up all his data and mailed it to him on a USB stick.
Hunting for cold stellar corpses near the center of the galaxy or in star clusters could put new limits on the properties of dark matter.
“You can exclude a big class of theories that the experiments cannot exclude just by observing the temperature of a neutron star,†said physicist Chris Kouvaris of the University of Southern Denmark, lead author of a paper in the Sept. 28 Physical Review D. “Maybe by observations, which come cheaper than expensive experiments, we might get some clues about dark matter.â€
Dark matter is the irritatingly invisible stuff that makes up some 23 percent of the universe, but makes itself known only through its gravitational tug on ordinary matter.
There are several competing theories about what dark matter actually is, but one of the most widely pursued is a hypothetical weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP). Physicists in search of WIMPs have placed experimental detectors deep underground in mines and mountains, and are waiting for a dark matter particle to hit them.
Others have proposed looking for the buildup of dark matter in stars like the sun or white dwarfs. But both subterranean and stellar-detection strategies will light up only for WIMPs larger than a certain size. That size is miniscule — about a trillionth of a quadrillionth of a square centimeter — but dark matter particles could be smaller still.
One way to rule out such diminutive particles is to look to neutron stars, suggest Kouvaris and co-author Peter Tinyakov of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
Neutron stars are the cold, dense remnants of massive stars that died in fiery supernova explosions. They tend to have masses similar to the sun, but in diameter they would barely stretch from one end of Manhattan to the other. This extreme density makes neutron stars exceptionally good nets for dark matter.
“For their size and their temperature, they have the best efficiency in capturing WIMPs,†Kouvaris said. Particles up to 100 times smaller than the ones underground experiments are sensitive to could still make a noticeable difference to neutron stars.
After the fires of their birth, neutron stars slowly cool over millions of years as they radiate photons. But if WIMPs annihilate each other whenever they meet — like a particle of matter meeting a particle of antimatter — as some models suggest they should, dark matter could reheat these cold stars from the inside.
Kouvaris calculated the minimum temperature for a WIMP-burning neutron star, and found it to be about 100,000 kelvins [about 180,000 degrees Fahrenheit]. That’s more than 10 times hotter than the surface of the sun, but more than 100 times cooler than the sun’s fuel-burning interior. It’s also much cooler than any neutron star yet observed.
Dark matter and ordinary matter are thought to clump up in some of the same places, like the center of the galaxy or globular clusters of stars. So Kouvaris and Tinyakov suggest that astronomers try to find a neutron star colder than the minimum temperature in a region with a lot of dark matter floating around.
“If you observe a neutron star with a temp below the one we predict, that excludes a whole class of dark-matter candidates,†Kouvaris said. It could mean the WIMPs are extra-small, or that they don’t annihilate when they meet each other — a property of WIMPs that experiments can’t get at.
“It’s an intriguing idea,†said observational astronomer David Kaplan University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “But I’m a little skeptical that it can be done immediately, or even in the near future.â€
The center of the galaxy is dusty and difficult to observe, and most globular clusters are so far away that a cold, tiny neutron star hiding inside them would be beyond today’s telescopes. The next generation of ultraviolet telescopes could be up to the task, Kaplan suggests. “But that’s not to say that it will be easy.â€
Astronomer Bob Rutledge of McGill University suggests an alternative approach: Rather than squinting for neutron stars’ dim light, astronomers could find them through ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. When two neutron stars merge, they are expected to throw off massive amounts of these waves, and Earth-based detectors like LIGO are already in place to catch them — although no waves have actually shown up yet.
“It would be technically hard, but a sound approach,†Rutledge said. “This sort of thing could become possible in the more distant future.â€
Image: Artist’s impression of a neutron star with a powerful magnetic field, called a magnetar. Credit: NASA
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