Hidden Egyptian pyramids found by infra-red satellite images
Seventeen lost pyramids are among the buildings identified in a new satellite survey of Egypt.
More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements were also revealed by looking at infra-red images which show up underground buildings.
Sweet.
“Indiana Jones is old school, we’ve moved on from Indy. Sorry, Harrison Ford.”
Identify trees with your iPhone
An app that uses image recognition to tell you what type of tree you’re looking at based on the shape of its leaves? So cool. And plus:
Users of Leafsnap will not only be learning about the trees in their communities and on their hikes—they will also be contributing to science. As people use Leafsnap, the free mobile app automatically shares their images, species identifications and the tree’s location with a community of scientists. These scientists will use the information to map and monitor population growth and decline of trees nationwide.
Seems like fun. I gave it a try and while I’m no botanist, it seemed to work pretty well.
Exoplanets without a star: galaxy teems with lonely Jupiters
Christopher Dombrowski, writing for Ars Technica:
[T]his week astronomers are announcing a truly unique and new class of exoplanets: Jupiter sized planets that are in extremely large orbits or completely unbound from a host star altogether. And there appear to be a lot of them, as these planets seem to be more common than main sequence stars.
I really wonder what it would be like to live on a moon of one of these planets. Without a nearby star, would the planet even be illuminated in the sky? Or would it simply be a dark disk blocking out starlight.
General Relativity confirmed yet again
The results from Gravity Probe B — the experiment to measure the warping of space time caused by our extremely heavy, quickly spinning planet — are in, and once again, Einstein’s theories are validated. The technology required to measure all this accurately is truly awe-inspiring — the above article gives a pretty good run down.
Some more information about the science they’re trying to measure is here. Too cool.
Visions of the Future: Isaac Asimov’s Unrealized TV Series
Two years before his death, [Isaac] Asimov recorded a pilot for a TV series synthesizing his visionary ideas about where humanity is going. When he passed away in 1992, the pilot for the series was adapted into a tribute documentary titled Visions of the Future, now available on YouTube in four parts, totaling 40 minutes of rare footage and biographical background on the great thinker.
The series was intended to cover new breakthroughs in science and technology, preparing people for the coming future…
Got forty minutes to spare? Watch this right now. Don’t have forty minutes? Well, you do now. I just made room in your schedule. Go for it.
An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces
The winner of the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was for a paper published in volume 33, issue 6 of the journal Applied Ergonomics. The paper, written by seven researchers in Australia, is titled “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces.” Here’s the abstract:
Some occupational health and safety hazards associated with sheep shearing are related to shearing shed design. One aspect is the floor of the catching pen, from which sheep are caught and dragged to the shearing workstation. Floors can be constructed from various materials, and may be level or gently sloping. An experiment was conducted using eight experienced shearers as participants to measure the force exerted by a shearer when dragging a sheep. Results showed that significant changes in mean dragging force occurred with changes in both surface texture and slope. The mean dragging forces for different floor textures and slopes ranged from 359 N (36.6 kg) to 423N (43.2 kg), and were close to the maximum acceptable limits for pulling forces for the most capable of males. The best floor tested was a floor sloped at 1:10 constructed of timber battens oriented parallel to the path of the drag, which resulted in a mean dragging force 63.6N (15%) lower than the worst combination.
Founder of Bose donates stock to MIT
Dr. Amar Bose ’51, Bose Corporation’s Founder, has given to MIT the majority of the stock of Bose Corporation in the form of non-voting shares.
MIT will receive annual cash dividends on those shares when dividends are paid by Bose Corporation; those cash dividends will be used by MIT to sustain and advance MIT’s education and research mission.
Magnanimous.
Planets Could Orbit Singularities Inside Black Holes
A researcher at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow published a paper on arXiv on Monday studying orbits inside the event horizon of a black hole. We all know that black holes are supermassive objects in space with so much gravitational force that not even light can escape once it gets too close, right? Well, not being able to escape doesn’t mean that you have to be sucked into the singularity in the middle and destroyed:
A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. However, cosmologists have known for some time that there are regions inside charged, rotating black holes where objects such as photons can survive in stable periodic orbits.
[Vyacheslav] Dokuchaev’s contribution is to study these orbits in detail and to explore their dynamics. …
It’s well known that a traveller passing through a black hole’s event horizon arrives in a region in which the radial dimension becomes time-like, rather than space-like. Conventional orbits are clearly impossible here.
But travel further in and there is another horizon where the dimensions switch back again (at least, inside charged and rotating black holes). This is the inner Cauchy horizon and it’s beyond here that Dokuchaev says the interesting orbits for massive planets exist.
Since the orbit is inside the event horizon, it’s impossible to leave once you enter that orbit. Likewise, it’d be impossible to tell from the outside that there was something orbiting a black hole on the inside. But heck, if something can orbit a black hole, why not a whole civilization?
Of course, such a civilisation would have to cope with extraordinary conditions such as huge tidal forces and the huge energy density that builds up in these stable orbits as photons become trapped. There’s also the small problem of causality violations, which some cosmologists predict would plague this kind of tortured space-time.
Rob Waters:
The nanoparticles “rip holes in the membrane walls and the contents basically spill out,” said Hedrick, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. “They’re very selective and once they do their job, they go away. They degrade into an innocuous by-product.”
MRSA — basically an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — is a horrible lot to draw. Seems like a fantastic use of nanotechnology.
(Via Jens Ayton.)