Science Reblog: Space Shot of the Day: Cathedral to Massive Stars

From The Daily What: Space Shot of the Day: Cathedral to Massive Stars

The Hubble Space Telescope took this spellbinding image of Pismis 24 (shown center above), one of the most massive and luminous star clusters known, glimmering above the NGC 6357 nebula that is approximately 8150 light-years away. According to NASA’s estimates, the brightest star of Pismis 24 cluster is over 200 times the mass of our Sun.

 

What Stan at TYWKIWDBI is posting

 

Tina and I have a busy shooting day today, and I am leaning on other blogs to help out today.

TYWKIWDBI is probably one of my favorite blogs right now, as Stan’s interests are either my interests or are quickly becoming ones I admire.

Above is a recent photo he posted from NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day. Click to enlarge.

Below are two posts that I thought you might enjoy. The first one is a must-click.

Bon appétit.

• Introducing Hypatia
• Shoes made from human skin
• How javelins are returned at the Olympics

 

 

The aliens have landed and they’re helping us dig holes

Photograph via mejjad

You have to click on the above image to enlarge.

That thing in the picture is the world’s largest land vehicle. I bet you a bit of money, it’s the universe’s largest land vehicle. And if you prove me wrong, we’ll both win.

I’ll let Twisted Sifter tell you what it is.

The $100 million Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), built by the German company Krupp (now ThyssenKrupp) for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine.

When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded NASA’s Crawler-Transporter, used to carry the Space Shuttle and Apollo Saturn V launch vehicle, as the largest land vehicle in the world. It is 311 feet (95 meters) tall, 705 feet (215 meters) long and weighs 45,500 tons. The machine took five years to design and manufacture and another five years to assemble.

The Bagger 288 was built for the job of removing overburden prior to coal mining in Tagebau Hambach (Hambach stripmine), Germany. It can excavate 240,000 tons of coal or 240,000 cubic metres of overburden daily – the equivalent of a soccer field dug to 30 meters (98 ft) deep. The coal produced in one day fills 2400 coal wagons. It takes five people to operate the machine.

Via TDW

Put some plastic down, here’s an orbital time lapse that will blow your mind brains all over your floor

Check out this awesome time-lapse moving through space that is sure to impress you. You’ll have to go to gizmodo to watch it, but come back and let me know what your brains look like since they’ll be spread around the floor around you after watching.

About the video:

The video, compiled by Michael König, combines “photographs taken with a special low-light 4K-camera by the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011.” König says the video is the result of some post-production tweaking—it’s been “refurbished, smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc.”—but there’s no software gimmick that can match up to being slapped in the face with the Aurora Borealis in HD. I wanted to file this under “looks so good it can’t possibly be real,” but this is the real deal—all the goods come straight from NASA. The only remaining question is, why does earth look so impossibly spectacular from up there, and so mediocre from where I’m sitting?

Thanks, Xina!

 

What the kids are posting

Were you crying because you needed a dose of “What the kids are posting”? Did you forget that those meanie-bom-beaties over at reddit.com/r/atheism are still hard at work posting silly images on non-belief?

Well, you’re in luck. Here are a few for your viewing pleasure.

 

 

Image of Neil deGrasse Tyson says, “Is that how you want to play this game? … If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for god, then god is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”

 

Old man wearing a t-shirt that says, “Too stupid to understand science? Try religion.” 

Comic about being left-handed in the middle ages. “It’s evil. You must renounce this behavior. What if it’s natural? There’s no proof.” 

 

 

 

 

Little boy throwing the peace sign wearing a t-shirt that reads, “Who the fuck is Jesus?” 

A photo of an SBU Freethinkers flyer says, “Fact of the week: A thorough reading of the bible yields two characters with significantly different kill counts; one of whom has two-hundred thousand times more kills than the other. That character would be god, with 2,038,344 kills compared to the lord of evil, Satan, with 10 kills.” 

 

Time to pack it up, boys and girls. Hubble proves god created the universe.

 

 

 

Believe it or not, this is not from a reliable source (aka The Onion). Read here or full text below the jump. 

 

Just the politicians?

This graphic was pretty viral about a month or two ago. The line about the politician makes me wonder, “Why only politicians?”

Quote from Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut says, 

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

Honey, did you see what the cat(fish) dragged into the back yard?

Damn you, Global Warming!

From BlackEiffel blog:

Crikey! Did you see this? From what I understand, a mondo iceberg four times the size of Manhattan broke into pieces off the coast of Greenland last year, and now nearly a year later they are seeing it appear off the ‘iceberg alley’ shores of Newfoundland!

The top photo is a slice of ice that hit Newfoundland’s Goose Cove temporarily blocking the harbor until it broke and melted a bit.

That largest iceberg piece? They call it ‘Petermann’s Ice Island’ which NASA has been watching and it has yet to hit the shores. Pretty surreal, huh?! I am continually fascinated by the mighty nature and beauty of icebergs! (See previous post) You can see a video clip for the magnitude of Petermann’s Ice Island here.

 

 

Via 

Monday Morning Reading List

Mondays are Monday-ish. Today is especially Monday-like. I’m posting some reading links that you might be interested in.

• Did scientists discover bacteria in meteorites? PZ Myers’ short answer: no. Read on.
• Does co-habitation result in an increased divorce rates? Hemant Mehta reports no.
• Cynical Chris posts a crapload of screen caps of his readers’ desktops. It’s oddly entertaining.
• Barna group reports 16 to 29 year olds are expressing skepticism and frustration with Christianity. Read here.
• Resident believer Julie Ferwerda questions the good, the bad and the fugly. Just kidding. Just the good and the bad. Read here. I wonder if people jump too quickly on the “belief is good” bandwagon.
• Listen to the hits. Matt Dillahunty responds to a believer on his show back in 2008. It’s a good one.

Above, a very un-edited shot from yesterday’s shoot.

 

NASA Scientists Disover New Life Form

Complete reblog from Atheist Media.

From Gizmodo:

NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything. Updated.

NASA is saying that this is “life as we do not know it”. The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

That was true until today. In a surprising revelation, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today, working differently than the rest of the organisms in the planet. Instead of using phosphorus, the newly discovered microorganism—called GFAJ-1 and found in Mono Lake, California—uses the poisonous arsenic for its building blocks. Arsenic is an element poisonous to every other living creature in the planet except for a few specialized microscopic creatures.
Read more

Via Atheist Media

***UPDATE***

As Kilre so helpfully pointed out in the comments, this discovery isn’t as big as it’s purported to be. PZ Myers explains it here. I should have been a little more skeptical after I saw comments from AatRB Julie on facebook. That’s what I get for not researching what I post.

I should have also red flagged that the story came from Gizmodo, a web site with a penchant for yellow journalism worse than Fox News.