Back up everything friends! https://www.axios.com/2025/04/04/noaa-research-websites-go-dark-saturday-night #science #uspol
science
To keep my American brain from exploding today, here are some remarkable new deep-space images from JWST.
First, a celestial smash-up. JWST's infrared eyes reveal cold dust that forms the "skeleton" of these colliding galaxies, known as IC 2163 and NGC 2207.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2024/news-2024-136 #space #science #nature #astronomy
Why seeing Galileo’s original experiments left me speechless
The Galileo Museum in Italy shows how modern science was born through centuries of effort and discovery.
By Adam Frank
https://bigthink.com/13-8/why-seeing-galileos-original-experiments-left-me-speechless/
Although the Nonprofit Industrial Complex has some sophisticated gatekeepers barring access, I've renewed my efforts to find San Francisco Bay Area cooperators interested in my proposed nonprofit for unique S.T.E.A.M.-focused ArtScience demonstration projects that serve the common good.
While general participants are welcome, I need the commitment of board-level founders.
#SFBA, #EastBay, #NonProfit, #Research, #Design, #Development, #CitizenScience, #Science, #Technology, #Engineering, #Arts, #Math, #Cooperative, #Mutualism, #Prefigurative
NASA's visualization team created a beautiful preview of every phase of the Moon in 2025, hour by hour.
The best part: Watching how the Moon's appearance changes due to its inclination, oval orbit, and libration (wobble).
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5415 #science #nature #nasa #astronomy #space
#OTD in 1915.
Albert Einstein presents the field equations of general relativity in the form of a tensor equation to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_field_equations
General relativity at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36114
Why did Louis de Broglie, Nobel laureate in physics, abandon his own pilot wave theory?
By Laurie Letertre
Such a great story! 😍
"Fold paper. Insert lens. This $2 microscope changes how kids see the world"
https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/11/24/g-s1-35181/microscope-lens-students-foldscope
"Once assembled the Foldscope is the size of a bookmark. It’s small enough to fit in a pocket and can magnify up to 140 times.
Each unit costs around $2 to make. Foldscopes are offered for free to kids in lower income countries; various upgraded models with extras are sold as well, earning money for the charitable endeavor."
1/ Something I love about my job is liaising between scientists and artists to create visualisations that illustrate astronomical phenomena. While telescopic images often speak for themselves, more complex data like spectra can't be easily interpreted without a professional background in astronomy.
It's a delicate balance: we just want to complement the actual data without replacing it! In this video we show you how we approach this:
PRESS RELEASE: https://www.seti.org/team-unlocks-new-insights-pulsar-signals
Dr. Sofia Sheikh from the SETI Institute led a study that sheds new light on how pulsar signals—the spinning remnants of massive stars—distort as they travel through space. This study, published in The Astrophysical Journal, was performed by a multi-year cohort of undergraduate researchers in the Penn State branch of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory student club.
Under #Trump, #EPA scientists say managers encouraged them to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, including #cancer, miscarriage and neurological problems, from their reports. And in some cases, they said, their managers deleted the information themselves.
#News #Science #Environment #Health #Government
(Published Sept. 2024) https://propub.li/3Zx4ljp
Mária Telkes died #OTD in 1980. She was a Hungarian-American biophysicist, engineer, & inventor who worked on solar energy technologies.
During World War II, she developed a solar water distillation device, deployed at the end of the war, which saved the lives of downed airmen and torpedoed sailors. In the 1940s she and architect Eleanor Raymond created one of the first solar-heated houses, Dover Sun House, by storing energy each day.
I really like wondering how can we improve peer review. At the same time, whenever I see someone proclaiming peer review doesn't work, my first reaction is: "why, only because it's not perfect?"
PRESS RELEASE: https://www.seti.org/press-release/jill-tarter-receive-inaugural-tarter-award-innovation-search-life-beyond-earth
Renowned astronomer Dr. Jill Tarter, co-founder and pioneering SETI researcher, will be honored with the inaugural Tarter Award for Innovation in the Search for Life Beyond Earth at the SETI Institute’s 40th Anniversary celebration on November 20, 2024, in Menlo Park, CA. This new award recognizes individuals whose projects or ideas significantly advance humanity’s search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence.
"Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve."
Where is Science Going? The Universe in the light of modern physics.
#OTD in 1900.
Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law (quantum theory) at the Physic Society in Berlin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_law
Max Planck at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/35343
#Introduction Hi #fediverse ! We’re the European Southern Observatory, and we design, build and operate ground-based telescopes.
One of them is our Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in #Chile. It will have a 39 m mirror, and its rotating enclosure will weigh 6100 tonnes, or about 700 mastodons!
We’re looking forward to chatting with all of you about #astronomy
📷 ESO/G. Vecchia
J. J. Thomson, who was born #OTD in 1856, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.
Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson and Edward Victor Appleton.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Thomson
Books by J.J. Thomson at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/38322
One of Kristian Birkeland's experiments with a terrella, or small magnetized model of the earth. Birkeland constructed terrella as a physical simulation to experimentally investigate solar phenomena such as sunspots, the rings of Saturn, and the sun's corona. His most famous experiment, depicted below, attempted to replicate the effects of solar wind on our Earth's magnetic field such as the Northern Lights.
Such terrella are now defunct in favor of computational simulations, but I find these to be objects of wonder, and their physical existence placing them a step above any digital recreation, no matter how high the fidelity.
The terrella themselves, according to what I can find, always consisted of brass or aluminum spheres, with an electromagnetic coil inside. Gas discharges would then be released from the surface as well as an electrode in one corner. They would then run a current through the electromagnetic coil in the interior, producing the magnetic field to interact with the gas discharge.
Photo credits to Wikipedia.
Here's the best article I found on the history of these objects: https://web.archive.org/web/20170718062508/http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/about/sphaera/sphaera-issue-no-7/the-birkeland-terrella/
#OTD in 1787.
William Herschel discovers Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus.
Orbiting at a much greater distance from Uranus are the ten known irregular moons. The planet's magnetosphere is highly asymmetric and has many charged particles, which may be the cause of the darkening of its rings and moons.
The Hubble telescope has spent 20 years staring at Uranus and...
Oh fine, go ahead and snicker. The observations are fascinating all the same. They show that Uranus is a complex, dynamic planet with crazy sideways weather.
https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2025/news-2025-011 #space #science #astronomy #nasa
PRESS RELEASE: https://www.seti.org/press-release/seti-forward-recognizes-tomorrows-cosmic-pioneers
The SETI Institute announces the 2024 SETI Forward Award recipients: Gabriella Rizzo and Pritvik Sinhadc. Established by Lew Levy, SETI Forward committee founder and member of the SETI Institute’s Council of Advisors, this award is a beacon for promising young scientists. The goal is to connect students with opportunities that foster their passion for SETI and astrobiology, guiding them toward meaningful careers.
"Throughout space there is energy. Is this energy static or kinetic! If static our hopes are in vain; if kinetic — and this we know it is, for certain — then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheelwork of nature."
Serbian-American inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla died #OTD in 1943.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
Books by Nikola Tesla at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5067
What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know.
Exactly 200 years ago, a French engineer introduced an idea that would quantify the universe’s inexorable slide into decay. But entropy, as it’s currently understood, is less a fact about the world than a reflection of our growing ignorance. Embracing that truth is leading to a rethink of everything from rational decision-making to the limits of machines.
By Zack Savistky
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entropy-a-measure-of-just-how-little-we-really-know-20241213/
English astronomer Frank Watson Dyson was born #OTD in 1868.
Dyson was noted for his study of solar eclipses and was an authority on the spectrum of the corona and on the chromosphere. Dyson presented his observations of the solar eclipse of May 29, 1919 which confirmed Albert Einstein's theory of the effect of gravity on light which until that time had been received with some scepticism by the scientific community.
