Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

C Robert O’Dell the American physics and astronomy professor has been featured by Rick Docksai in an article published in the Science Recorder titled ‘Ring Nebula is expanding at 43,000 miles an hour, according to Hubble’. Docksai states “The Ring Nebula apparently has been misnamed: It’s not a ring at all, but a football-shaped jelly doughnut.  …Scientists [had] concluded that this nebula has a hollow middle and ring-shaped—hence came its present-day moniker. But the latest analysis, led by Robert O’Dell, …arrived at a wholly other conclusion. The nebula’s center is quite full, O’Dell and his team state. However, varying patterns of motion may cause the middle to look unlike the rest of the nebula from our vantage point, and hence some of the visual illusion. The entire cloud is expanding by more than 43,000 miles an hour, but the growth is even faster at the center than it is in the outer ring. Consequently, the middle is much lower-density than the rest of the nebula. The Hubble images that O’Dell and his team used are the highest-precision views of the nebula taken yet. While earlier observations had identified the presence of gaseous material in the center, none had gathered all of the detail of this latest Hubble presentation, such as the star that is indeed at the center—though it is now dying. The nebula measures just one light-year across, so it’s compact enough that this one star’s end-of-life expansions and contractions could stand out prominently to observers here on Earth, even if those observers were using eighteenth-century telescopes. In fact, this dying star is probably what brought the nebula into being in the first place. Scientists designate the Ring Nebula a “planetary nebula,” which means that it forms out of the gas and dust that emanates from a star that’s fading out. While this nebula’s star will continue to shine for a fairly long while by human time, scientists say that it is definitively on its way to white-dwarf status.”

Inspired by Rick Docksai, Science Recorder ow.ly/lMDlV Image source Vanderbilt ow.ly/lMBEF

Esther Inglis-Arkell the American physics writer blogging about what makes things explode has published an article on io9 titled ‘There is no such thing as emptiness. There is only quantum foam’. Inglis-Arkell states “According to some scientists, there is no such thing as empty space. What we have instead is called “quantum foam.” We can’t see it, but we just might be able to sense it. The guy who came up with the term “quantum foam” is John Wheeler. In the “shut up and calculate” era of post-World War II era, he pushed both students and the world at large to keep thinking about Einstein’s theory of relativity and its consequences – so you know he was cool. He also had the middle name of Archibald – so you know he knew a thing or two about cool names. And so it’s natural that he used term “quantum foam” to describe one of the more perplexing ideas of physics. The idea comes from the attempts to merge relativistic gravity with quantum mechanics. Gravity, Einstein proved, was a bending of the fabric of spacetime. It also behaves like a field. Place a point far away from the Earth, and it still will be part of the Earth’s gravitational field, but it will be out where the tug of gravity is weak. Place it close to the Earth, and the tug is stronger, and it will fall. Other planets warp spacetime and create their own gravitational tugs. So space isn’t gravity-free, but a vast array of different gravitational tugs through which particles move. Pretty much everywhere that anything is placed, there is a gravitational field that it moves through. …There are ideas on how to “see” this quantum foam. They vary in technique. Some ideas, such as the randomly appearing and disappearing particles, have already been established.  Either way, we have a creamy new way of seeing the universe.”

Inspired by Esther Inglis-Arkell, io9 ow.ly/jBdnL Image source Revision3 ow.ly/jBdmi

Drastic increase in the death rate of words (April 13th 2012)

Joel Tenenbaum the 28 year old doctoral student in physics at Boston University is part of a team undertaking a scientific analysis of language usage over the past two centuries in literature. In an article by Alison Flood published in the Guardian, Tenenbaum’s team states in their report “words are competing actors in a system of finite resources” with a “drastic increase in the death rate of words… Most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10 to 20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words… The words that are dying are those words with low relative use. We confirm by visual inspection that the lists of dying words contain mostly misspelled and nonsensical words… Analogous to recessions and booms in a global economy, the marketplace for words waxes and wanes with a global pulse as historical events unfold, and in analogy to financial regulations meant to limit risk and market domination, standardisation technologies such as the dictionary and spellcheckers serve as powerful arbiters in determining the characteristic properties of word evolution.”

Inspired by Alison Flood http://ow.ly/a7012 image source P2P Webblog http://ow.ly/a6ZVo