Meet The Spleen, The Strange Little Organ That Can Multiply

Buzz Aldrin inside the Gemini 12 spacecraft, November 13, 1966.

(NASA/University of Arizona)

A nebula (Latin for "cloud";[2] pl. nebulae, nebulæ, or nebulas) is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases. Originally, nebula was a name for any diffuse astronomical object, including galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy, for instance, was referred to as the Andromeda Nebula (and spiral galaxies in general as "spiral nebulae") before the true nature of galaxies was confirmed in the early 20th century by Vesto Slipher, Edwin Hubble and others.

Most nebulae are of vast size, even hundreds of light years in diameter.[3] Although denser than the space surrounding them, most nebulae are far less dense than any vacuum created in an Earthen environment - a nebular cloud the size of the Earth would have a total mass of only a few kilograms. Nebulae are often star-forming regions, such as in the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula. In these regions the formations of gas, dust, and other materials "clump" together to form larger masses, which attract further matter, and eventually will become massive enough to form stars. The remaining materials are then believed to form planets and other planetary system objects.

Stephen Hawking: 'If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.'

All is not lost if you fall into a black hole – you could simply pop up in another universe, according to Stephen Hawking.

The celebrated physicist has a new theory about where lost information ends up after being sucked into a black hole, a place where gravity compresses matter to a point where the usual laws of physics break down.

In a public lecture in Stockholm, Sweden, Prof Hawking said: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.” He said he had discovered a mechanism “by which information is returned out of the black hole”.

He was speaking at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) is hosting the Hawking Radiation Conference dedicated to examining the mystery of the “information paradox” – a conundrum concerning what happens to things swallowed by black holes.

Information about the physical state of something disappearing into a black hole appears to be completely lost. But according to the way the universe works, this should be impossible. Even information falling into a black hole ought to end up somewhere.

According to Hawking, it does – in one of two ways. Either it is translated into a kind of “hologram” on the edge of the black hole, or it breaks out into an alternative universe.

In his lecture, reported in a blog from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, he said: “The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible. The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.

“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”

Hawking is director of research at Cambridge University’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

• This article was amended on 27 August 2015. An earlier version said the KTH Royal Institute of Technology was hosting the conference.

How Close Are We To Nuclear Fusion?

“Naysayers love to claim that nuclear fusion is always decades away — and always will be — but the reality is we’ve moved ever closer to the breakeven point and solved a large number of technical challenges over the past twenty years. Nuclear fusion, if we ever achieve it on a large scale, will usher in a new era for humanity: one where energy conservation is a thing of the past, as the fuel for our heart’s desires will literally be without limits.”

The ultimate dream when it comes to clean, green, safe, abundant energy is nuclear fusion. The same process that powers the core of the Sun could also power everything on Earth millions of times over, if only we could figure out how to reach that breakeven point. Right now, we have three different candidates for doing so: inertial confinement, magnetic confinement, and magnetized target fusion. Recent advances have all three looking promising in various ways, making one wonder why we don’t spend more resources towards achieving the holy grail of energy.

A special Astrophysics Documentary about Space, Time & our Universe.

Toshiko Yuasa

Nuclear physicist Toshiko Yuasa was born on December 11, 1909 in Taitō City, Japan. Unable to conduct research on nuclear physics in occupied postwar Japan, Yuasa went to France to do her scientific work. With the use of a Wilson chamber, she did experimental nuclear research in beta-decay. In 1957, she became a chief researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Her role as a trailblazer for Japanese women in science has elicited comparisons to Marie Curie, and she actively encouraged young women to study science.

Toshiko Yuasa died in 1980 at the age of 70.

Forget the past, live the present, dream the future.

Maritina Christofilakou

Throwback Thursday: Do you really love science?

“That’s okay, because you’re a scientist! Your old theory — or way of making sense of the world — now gets revised, and replaced with a new one that’s even better at describing the full suite of phenomena you’re aware of.”

When you first venture out into the world, you’re armed, as a human being, with an incredible intelligence, but with no experience. All sorts of basic things must be learned, often the hard way: hot things will burn you, hot things that don’t look hot will also burn you, and that even very cold things will burn you, too. Figuring those things out – and the process by which you learn them – is science, in and of itself. But to move forward requires that we understand why, and that’s where scientific theories, leaps and even revolutions come into play. Don’t let bad science reporting take you away from what science is really all about: the knowledge and joy of figuring out how the world and Universe really works.

A galaxy cluster or cluster of galaxies is a structure that consists of anywhere from hundreds to thousands of galaxies bound together by gravity.[1] They are the largest known gravitationally bound structures in the universe and were the largest known structures in the universe until the 1980s when superclusters were discovered.[2] One of the key features of clusters is the intracluster medium or ICM. The ICM consists of heated gas between the galaxies and has a temperature on the order of 7-9 keV. Galaxy clusters should not be confused with star clusters such as open clusters, which are structures of stars within galaxies, as well as globular clusters, which typically orbit galaxies. Small aggregates of galaxies are referred to as groups of galaxies rather than clusters of galaxies. The groups and clusters can themselves cluster together to formsuperclusters.