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Our educational system
In 2026, an unmanned NASA spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at 16 Psyche, a massive, metallic asteroid floating somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Why is NASA so interested in this heavy metal asteroid? Are we going to mine all that metal, or build a giant space magnet?
Actually, the real reason is right under our feet. The core of the Earth is thought to consist of a solid nickel-iron center with a molten outer layer. But we’re prevented from studying it up close by 2,800 kilometers of solid rock. The deepest we’ve been able to drill is 12 kilometers. Even if we could go further, the pressure at the core is three million times higher than at the surface, with a temperature of 5,000 degrees Celsius. Simply put, a journey to the center of the Earth is out of the question for now.
What makes Psyche so special is that it appears to have been a planetesimal well on its way to becoming a planet, with a rocky exterior surrounding a metal core. But its progress was cut short by a series of hit-and-run collisions with other planetesimals that knocked off the rocky crust until only the core remained. Experiencing that many destructive collisions with no additive ones in between is statistically very unlikely, making Psyche an amazingly rare opportunity to study an exposed metallic core.
Visiting a whole new kind of world is exciting enough on its own. But the mission to Psyche gives us a unique chance to discover our own planet’s innermost secrets in an orbit far, far away.
From the TED-Ed Lesson Why is NASA sending a spacecraft to a metal world? - Linda T. Elkins-Tanton
Animation by Eoin Duffy
Silicate Crystal Formation in the Disk of an Erupting Star
This artist’s concept illustrates how silicate crystals like those found in comets can be created by an outburst from a growing star. The image shows a young sun-like star encircled by its planet-forming disk of gas and dust. The silicate that makes up most of the dust would have begun as non-crystallized, amorphous particles.
Streams of material are seen spiraling from the disk onto the star increasing its mass and causing the star to brighten and heat up dramatically. The outburst causes temperatures to rise in the star’s surrounding disk.
When the disk warms from the star’s outburst, the amorphous particles of silicate melt. As they cool off, they transform into forsterite (see inset), a type of silicate crystal often found in comets in our solar system.
In April 2008, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope detected evidence of this process taking place on the disk of a young sun-like star called EX Lupi.
Credit: NASA/Spitzer | Animation: NASA Spitzer
Jupiter’s Clouds
Our friends at Symmetry put together a killer animation explaining Einstein’s most famous equation. Where else are you going to find the Higgs boson and anti-potatoes together in a stunning and illuminating video? Go check it out!
Author: Eleanor Lutz
Source: TabletopWhale.com
Facial hair goals…
if you ever feel bad about your body remember that Wonder Woman has cellulite too
Whoever is writing this is doing God’s work
Science enthusiasm in kids and teenagers, more two stories of year 2012 | Picture edited via Sci-Tech
10-Year-Old Accidentally Creates New Molecule in Science Class
Clara Lazen is the discoverer of tetranitratoxycarbon, a molecule constructed of, obviously, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. It’s got some interesting possible properties, ranging from use as an explosive to energy storage. Lazen is listed as the co-author of a recent paper on the molecule. But that’s not what’s so interesting and inspiring about this story. What’s so unusual here is that Clara Lazen is a ten-year-old fifth-grader in Kansas City, MO.
Kenneth Boehr, Clara’s science teacher, handed out the usual ball-and-stick models used to visualize simple molecules to his fifth-grade class. But Clara put the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms together in a particular complex way and asked Boehr if she’d made a real molecule. Boehr, to his surprise, wasn’t sure. So he photographed the model and sent it over to a chemist friend at Humboldt State University who identified it as a wholly new but also wholly viable chemical.
Sixteen-year-old Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad has found that an inexpensive catalyst could be used to create $78 million worth of biofuel each year. Egypt’s plastic consumption is estimated to total one million tons per year, so Azza’s proposal could transform the country’s economy, allowing it to make money from recycled plastic.What Azza proposes is to break down the plastic polymers found in drinks bottles and general waste and turn them into biofuel feedstock. (This is the bulk raw material that generally used for producing biofuel.) It should be noted that this is not a particularly new idea, but what makes Azza stand out from the crowd is the catalyst that she is proposing. She says that she has found a high-yield catalyst called aluminosilicate, that will break down plastic waste and also produce gaseous products like methane, propane and ethane, which can then be converted into ethanol.
Speaking about the breakthrough, Azza said that the technology could “provide an economically efficient method for production of hydrocarbon fuel” including 40,000 tons per year of cracked naptha and 138,000 tons of hydrocarbon gasses – the equivalent of $78 million in biofuel.
“We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
did y’all see this shit
One of applications of “slope” to explain puzzles and paradoxes -
Triangle Dissection Paradox“Below the two parts moved around - The partilisions are exactly the same, as those used above - From where "come” this hole?“
Explain: In the figure, the slope of the “hypotenuse” in figure 1 and figure 2 are completely different. (Click on image to see full size).
Also, The above two figures are rearrangements of each other, with the corresponding triangles and polyominoes having the same areas. Nevertheless, the bottom figure has an area one unit larger than the top figure (as indicated by the grid square containing the dot).The source of this apparent paradox is that the “hypotenuse” of the overall “triangle” is not a straight line, but consists of two broken segments. As a result, the “hypotenuse” of the top figure is slightly bent in, whereas the “hypotenuse” of the bottom figure is slightly bent out. The difference in the areas of these figures is then exactly the “extra” one unit. Explicitly, the area of triangular “hole” (0, 0), (8, 3), (13, 5) in the top figure is ½, as is the area of triangular “excess” (0, 0), (5, 2), (13, 5) in the bottom figure, for a total of one unit difference. Source: Triangle Dissection Paradox on Mathworld.wolfram.
- Slope: In mathematics, the slope or gradient of a line is a number that describes both the direction and the steepness of the line. Slope is often denoted by the letter m. Slope is calculated by finding the ratio of the “vertical change” to the “horizontal change” between (any) two distinct points on a line. Sometimes the ratio is expressed as a quotient (“rise over run”), giving the same number for every two distinct points on the same line. The rise of a road between two points is the difference between the altitude of the road at those two points, say y1 and y2, or in other words, the rise is (y2 − y1) = Δy. For relatively short distances - where the earth’s curvature may be neglected, the run is the difference in distance from a fixed point measured along a level, horizontal line, or in other words, the run is (x2 − x1) = Δx. Here the slope of the road between the two points is simply described as the ratio of the altitude change to the horizontal distance between any two points on the line.
- Also, here are the direction of a line is either increasing, decreasing, horizontal or vertical:
- A line is increasing if it goes up from left to right. The slope is positive, i.e. m>0.
- A line is decreasing if it goes down from left to right. The slope is negative, i.e. m<0.- If a line is horizontal the slope is zero. This is a constant function.
- If a line is vertical the slope is undefined (see below).The steepness, incline, or grade of a line is measured by the absolute value of the slope. A slope with a greater absolute value indicates a steeper line - Source: Slope on Wikipedia
- Image: Shared at - http://imgur.com/lYy5b & Slope on Wikipedia
UGC 1810 The Rose Galaxy
Credit: NASA/Hubble, Mehdi Bozzo-Rey