Enjoy Tonight's Troubadour. Does our DNA Carry an Alien Message? Other Space and Science News. The Imaginarium

Space and Science News

The Answer to Whether Alien Life Exists May Be Hiding Inside Our Bodies

The answer to whether alien life exists may be hiding inside our own body!

According to a new theory, human genetic code is embedded with a "designer label" that may be an indelible stamp of a master extraterrestrial civilisation that preceded us by many millions or billions of years.

Picture source: topnews

Researchers Vladimir I shCherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, hypothesise that an intelligent signal embedded in our genetic code would be a mathematical and semantic message that cannot be accounted for by Darwinian evolution.  Read More

Our Sun's Classification

Like most scientists, astronomers like to categorize the Universe around them, and stars are no exception. Here’s how astronomers classify stars into different groups; let’s learn a bit about star classification.

Stars are classified based on the spectral characteristic of the light it’s giving off. As you probably know, the light we see with our eyes is actually a mixture of colors. You can break them up into their different parts just like you can use a prism to break sunlight into all the colors of a rainbow. The rainbow that we see is actually the spectrum produced by the Sun, and it’s different for different stars depending on their temperature. A cooler star will have a spectrum that has more red in it, while a hotter star will be shifted up towards the blue end of the spectrum.

What Causes that Great After Rain Smell

After a rainstorm, especially a rain storm that breaks a long dry spell, the world smells different. What causes that strange, clean, earthy smell?

Some of the smell, especially the parts that people identify as "clean," probably come from ozone. Oxygen atoms usually travels in pairs. Ozone consists of three oxygen atoms linked together. It's naturally created in the upper atmosphere, where the energy from ultraviolet light splits oxygen pairs in two. Each of the newly-single oxygen atoms is then taken up by oxygen pairs to form an ozone threesome. The same process can happen around waterfalls and after lightning strikes.

Ozone is sometimes used to kill off odors, especially smoky and moldy odors. The clean scent after a rainfall is partially caused by ozone cleaning away some of the scents we take for granted. Ozone also has a scent all its own. Some say it's like geraniums, but others compare it to a light bleach scent. Few sniff it for more than a moment because it does terrible damage to the lungs, splitting open cells and causing them to leak enzymes. A little ozone after the rain, however, does little damage for all the pleasure it brings.

The other main scent of a rainstorm is a sort of rich earthy smell, like freshly turned-over dirt. Actually, it's exactly like freshly turned-over dirt.

In pretty much any soil on Earth you'll find actinomycetes. These are bacteria that tend to grow in rich, wet dirt. They're beneficial both to the dirt and to us. Scientists have isolated antibiotics from dirt, and found that they're produced by these actinomycetes. When the soil dries out, the bacteria put out spores that can survive in the dry dirt. And then when it rains, the rain dampens the soil and kicks up the spores, so the scent is the of the bacteria in the air and dirt, going to work again.

From Io9

The Imaginarium
Make the ordinary, extraordinary

Why would you not intentionally go to your yoga class?

A cake for Mr. Adam

Creative soda company and packaging

Another speedier captured and ticketed

His first day in First Grade

I wonder what the code is?

A Home Wall Sculpture

From the top of the Eiffel Tower

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Picture makes up the ceiling in a smoking room

First Day of School. Space and Science News. The Imaginarium

Hello Troops,
It's 6:22 P.M. and I'm sitting here at my desk at Renaissance Academy.  My legs ache.  My voice is raspy.  I haven't taught a full day of school since the 1989-1990 school year.  For the last 23 years I taught one period of math and that was it.  My Space Center field trip took up the rest of my day.  Don't get me wrong, running two, three or even four missions a day was hard enough; but teaching a full day of school is difficult in other ways.  I'm just glad the day went as well as it did.

8:00 - 8:30 A.M.  Welcome to the 6th grade and all that jazz.  I did a bit of an introduction of the curriculum, then I throughly confused them with their daily rotations and class schedules.  I was clueless on some of their questions and did what any good new teacher would do - I directed them to my colleagues next door :)
8:30 - 9:30 A.M.  Math Rotation One:  Group A.  Another introduction of myself.  Group A is our 'approaching' math group.  Math is a challenge to our approaching group.
9:30 A.M. to 10:15 A.M.  Teacher prep time.  It took the entire period just to find places for all the donated supplies the kids brought to school with them.  I was flooded with notebooks, composition books, pens, pencils, expo markers, hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, 3X5 cards, colored pencils, markers, tissue, etc.  Teachers don't have a supply room at Renaissance.  We rely on parent donations and the parents never fail to come through.
10:15 to 11:20 A.M.  Language Arts.  Another introduction of myself to another group of kids.  We talked rules and expectations.  They wrote in their journals.
11:20 - 12:30 P.M.  My lunch and second prep period.  I walked to the nearby Smiths and treated myself to a package of jerky and a Diet Dew.
12:30 - 1:30 P.M.  Math Rotation Two:  Group B.  Another introduction of myself.  Group B is our middle of the road kids.
1:30 - 2:30 P.M.  Math Rotation Three:  Group C.  Another introduction of myself.  Group C is our advanced group.
2:30 - 3:00 P.M.  Language Arts continues with my home room.  They did a spelling test.
3:00 P.M.  Dismiss and I sit down for the first time.

I have my homeroom for language arts.  My students have music, art, and PE during my first prep period.  My students have lunch then world language (Spanish, Chinese or Arabic) during my lunch and second prep period.  It is a great program.  The kids get a well rounded education.

We have openings in the school's 7th, 8th and 9th grades if any of you are unhappy with your current school and situation.  We even have a few openings in the 6th grade.

I'd better end this post so I have time to plan for tomorrow.  When I take on a project is gets my full attention, and then more.  I did it with the Space Center and now its time to do it for my new class.  We also have Farpoint to build.  This is going to be a crazy year!  I've got my gym shoes on and I'm ready to hit the ground running.

Mr. Williamson

Space and Science News

11 Year Old's Cool Invention

Students Asked to Help in the Mars Mission Design

A private manned Mars mission may get some help from students on its way to the launch pad in 2018.
A newly announced contest asks students to propose design concepts for the Inspiration Mars mission, a private effort that aims to launch two astronauts on a flyby of the Red Planet in January 2018.
"Inspiration Mars is looking for the most creative ideas from engineers all over the world," Dennis Tito, executive director of the nonprofit Inspiration Mars Foundation, said in a statement Friday (Aug. 16).  Read More

Virgin America’s Plane Cabins

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This is the interior of the Airbus A320. But you could be forgiven for thinking it was the inside of a spaceship headed for the Gamma Quadrant. (Photos: Virgin America)

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Dyson’s 10-inch Air Multiplier

First off, anything with the word 'Dyson' in it has to be cool. Second, how the hell does this bladeless fan actually work?

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How Stuff Works explains:

As you might imagine, there are a few scientific principles at play here. There's also an electronic element. While the tube doesn't have any blades inside it, the pedestal of the fan contains a brushless electric motor that takes in air and feeds it into the circular tube. Air flows along the inside of the device until it reaches a slit inside the tube. This provides the basic airflow that creates the breeze you'd feel if you stood in front of the fan. Dyson claims that the Air Multiplier generates a breeze with 15 times more air than what the device actually takes in.

According to Dyson, the breeze generated by the Air Multiplier is more consistent and steady than one from a standard fan with blades. Since there are no rotating blades, the breeze from the fan doesn't buffet you with short gusts of air. [h/t Mark McAllister]

PhantomX Hexapod Robot

The way this thing moves — and runs — is waaaaaay too real, making us far more uncomfortable than we’d like to admit. This demo, which runs on Phoenix code, was developed for the Trossen Robotics Community.

 

  NASA’s Xenon-Ion Engine

 

If you were to imagine what a “xenon-ion space engine” was supposed to look like, you would probably picture something that looks exactly like this. This functional prototype sits in a vacuum chamber where it’s being tested at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It could be used by 2019 to propel an asteroid-retrieving robotic probe.

"Virgin Galactic has signed up 625 individuals for its planned suborbital spaceflights, lining up revenue of at least $125 million. A single trip into space will carry a price tag of $250,000."

Further Details :...

L#1 : http://is.gd/Jszg7E
L#2 : http://is.gd/5i1jwI

Future Earth - Addicted to Power

What will happen to the Earth? We tend to worry about issues like climate change that can have an impact over periods of time comparable to an average human lifetime.
For the Earth, however, the biggest changes generally happen over hundreds of millions or billions of years. Supercontinents come and go, mass extinctions wipe out almost all life, and changes in the surrounding Solar System have an impact.
It is ultimately the Sun that will decide Earth's fate. Billions of years from now, as our aging star begins to runs out of hydrogen fuel, it will change into a red giant and expand out into the inner Solar System as far out as the Earth's orbit.
Video: http://ow.ly/o1DpC


The Imaginarium
Taking the Ordinary and Making It Extraordinary

I support the Common Core, but I thought this was very imaginative and remember,
we celebrate imagination here in the Imaginarium

Not someone you'd like to go up against in a game of Jenga

Police will have a hard time with this.

A Pilot's Office.  

Well, its one way to relieve your customer's guilt

This person's little bit of heaven

A cool cast

I'll let you think about this one