Astronomers discover planet made of diamond

August 28, 2011

Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.
The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.

In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.

The measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

In addition to carbon, the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare toward the carbon-rich center.

Its high density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.

Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.

"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here."

Chicago Public Schools Recess: CEO Jean-Claude Brizard Says It Will Be Mandatory In 2012

August, 2011: The head of the Chicago Public Schools announced on a call-in radio program Monday night that he'd advocate for the return of mandatory recess at elementary schools around the city, marking a victory for parent advocacy groups that have been fighting for it for years.
CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said on WBEZ that he valued playtime for younger students, and that he would have enforced the mandate for this coming year if he'd been in office longer. Brizard was named to his current post in April of this year, coming over from Rochester Public Schools.
"We came in too late to actually push for a city-wide mandate for this fall," he said, "so we have quite a few more schools pushing recess during the school day for this coming fall. But by next fall, all schools - all elementary schools in the city - will have recess."
As of now, only 42 percent of schools have any recess at all: a mere 15 percent hold it outdoors, while 27 percent have recess in the classroom, according to a recent Chicago Sun-Times story.
Huffington Post Chicago wrote in May that CPS had asked schools to consider re-instating recess individually. Patricia O'Keefe of Raise Your Hand, a pro-recess coalition, was excited at the victory. "We're thrilled that we're going to finally stop depriving children of physical activity and the social time they deserve to be more productive members of society," she told the Chicago Tribune at the time.
And Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis came out in favor of recess as well, calling it a "win-win" in a conversation with the Sun-Times.
With Brizard's blessing, the remaining 58 percent of elementaries without recess should join the fold starting in the 2012-2013 school year. With the CEO and the city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, still pushing for a longer instructional day, some advocates say that there will be diminishing returns on those academic hours unless the students are given rest and play-time during the day.

'Pink Or Blue' Test Detects Baby's Gender At 7 Weeks

CHICAGO -- Is it a boy or a girl? New research shows that a simple blood test in mothers-to-be can answer that question with surprising accuracy at about seven weeks.
Though not widely offered by U.S. doctors, gender-detecting blood tests have been sold online to consumers for the past few years. Their promises of early and accurate results prompted genetics researchers to take a closer look.
Researchers analyzed 57 published studies of gender testing done in rigorous research or academic settings – though not necessarily the same methods or conditions used by direct-to-consumer firms.
The results suggest blood tests could be a breakthrough for women at risk of having babies with certain diseases. But the study also raises concerns about couples using such tests for gender selection and abortion.

Massive Solar Flares' Effects Arriving On Earth

August 5, 2011: WASHINGTON -- The impact of a series of eruptions on the sun began arriving at Earth on Friday and could affect some communications for a day or so.Operators of electrical grids are working to avoid outages, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says some satellite communications and Global Positioning Systems could face problems.
Three solar flares erupted on the sun starting Tuesday, and the strongest electromagnetic shocks were being felt Friday by the ACE spacecraft, a satellite that measures radiation bursts a few minutes before they strike Earth, said Joseph Kunches, a scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo.
Tom Bogdan, director of the center, said the sun is going from a quiet period into a busier cycle for solar flares and an increase in the number of such blasts is expected over the next three to five years.
Solar flares send out bursts of electromagnetic energy that strike the Earth's magnetic field. The most common impacts for the average person are the glowing auroras around the north and south poles, and the researchers said those could be visible this weekend.
The magnetic blasts, which Bogdan likened to a tsunami in space, can also affect electronic communications and electrical systems. A 1989 solar flare knocked out the electrical systems in Quebec, Canada, but the current solar storm is not expected to be that powerful. On a scale of 1 to 5, he said, it is probably a 2 or 3.
But more significant solar storms are expected in the next few years, he said.
The most powerful known solar storm occurred in 1859, Bogdan said. There were not as many vulnerable electrical items then, but it did knock out telegraph services, even burning down some telegraph stations, he said.
Other serious solar blasts occurred in 1921 and 1940, he noted, and Kunches recalled one on Halloween in 2003.

What is a Google? (Submitted by Pankhuri Panpher)

When you hear the word Google the first image that comes to mind has to be the famous internet search engine but does the word actually mean anything ? Well the answer is a firm yes because it comes from the term “Googol” which represents a number (written as a 1 followed by 100 zeros) so large that it’s actually larger than the total number of atoms in the known universe.
As you might imagine the number is rarely used except maybe in theoretical and computational calculations, however the big question is whether a number bigger than a Googol exists ? Well funnily enough there is and it’s called a googolplex which would be a number 1 followed by, wait for it not one thousand zeros, not even one million zeros but a googol zeroes.
Getting confused ? Well you should be because this number is so large that it’s almost impossible to imagine and also impossible to write because doing so would require more space than the known universe provides. Absolutely mind boggling don’t you think!
Lastly for those of you that are interested in where this term actually came from, well it was popularized in the 1940′s by the american mathematician Edward Kasner who created it as a useful number when comparing unimaginably large numbers with infinity. Oh and the actual term “googol” was coined by his then 9 year old nephew Milton Sirotta, not bad for a 9 year old!

Sugar Doesn't Melt -- It Decomposes, Scientists Demonstrate (Submitted by Josue Fernandez)

Flying in the face of years of scientific belief, University of Illinois researchers have demonstrated that sugar doesn't melt, it decomposes.
"This discovery is important to food scientists and candy lovers because it will give them yummier caramel flavors and more tantalizing textures. It even gives the pharmaceutical industry a way to improve excipients, the proverbial spoonful of sugar that helps your medicine go down," said Shelly J. Schmidt, a University of Illinois professor of food chemistry.
In a presentation to the Institute of Food Technologists about the importance of the new discovery, Schmidt told the food scientists they could use the new findings to manipulate sugars and improve their products' flavor and consistency.
"Certain flavor compounds give you a nice caramel flavor, whereas others give you a burnt or bitter taste. Food scientists will now be able to make more of the desirable flavors because they won't have to heat to a 'melting' temperature but can instead hold sugar over a low temperature for a longer period of time," she said.
Candy makers will be able to use a predictable time-temperature relationship, as the dairy industry does in milk pasteurization, to achieve better results, she said.
Schmidt and graduate student Joo Won Lee didn't intend to turn an established rule of food science on its head. But they began to suspect that something was amiss when they couldn't get a constant melting point for sucrose in the work that they were doing.
"In the literature, the melting point for sucrose varies widely, but scientists have always blamed these differences on impurities and instrumentation differences. However, there are certain things you'd expect to see if those factors were causing the variations, and we weren't seeing them," Schmidt said.
The scientists determined that the melting point of sugar was heating-rate dependent.
"We saw different results depending on how quickly we heated the sucrose. That led us to believe that molecules were beginning to break down as part of a kinetic process," she said.
Schmidt said a true or thermodynamic melting material, which melts at a consistent, repeatable temperature, retains its chemical identity when transitioning from the solid to the liquid state. She and Lee used high-performance liquid chromatography to see if sucrose was sucrose both before and after "melting." It wasn't.
"As soon as we detected melting, decomposition components of sucrose started showing up," she said.
To distinguish "melting" caused by decomposition from thermodynamic melting, the researchers have coined a new name -- "apparent melting." Schmidt and her colleagues have shown that glucose and fructose are also apparent melting materials.
Another of Schmidt's doctoral students is investigating which other food and pharmaceutical materials are apparent melters. She says the list is growing every day.
Having disposed of one food science mystery, Schmidt plans to devote time to others. For instance, staling intrigues her. "We could ship a lot more food around the world if we could stabilize it, keep it from getting stale," she said.
Or there's hydrate formation, which can make drink mixes clumpy if they're open for a while. "We've observed the results -- clumping under conditions of low relative humidity -- but we really don't know why it happens," she noted.
Schmidt said that new instruments are making it possible to probe some of the processes scientists have taken for granted in a way they couldn't do before.

Quick Facts About Humans (Submitted by Marisol Pantigoso)

 

1. If stomachs did not have a lining of mucus, your stomach would digest itself.
2. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
3. It takes about 60 seconds for a human blood cell to make a complete circuit of the body.
4. The average person will shed 40 pounds of skin in his/her lifetime.
5. 1/15th of a pint of blood is pumped with every heartbeat.
6. Humans share 98.4% of our DNA with chimps. In comparison, we share 70% of our DNA with a slug.
7. The lightest baby to survive weighed a mere 283 grams.
8. On average, women say 7,000 words per day while men manage just over 2,000 words.
9. The human brain uses 20% of the body’s energy but is only 2% of the body’s weight.
10. On average, humans lose 40-100 strands of hair per day.
11. A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100mph.
12. A cough can reach the speed of 60mph.
13. The average person will drink about 16,000 gallons of water in his/her lifetime.
14. It takes 17 muscles to smile while taking 43 muscles to frown.
15. The human brain is composed of 75% water.
16. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
17. More germs are transferred while shaking hands compared to kissing.
18. There are approximately 550 hairs in a person’s eyebrow.
19. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
20. A person produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in an average lifetime.
21. The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
22. The number of eye blinks varies greatly from about 29 blinks each minute if you are talking to someone to only 4 blinks each minute if you are reading.
23. The average human blinks 25 times per minute.
24. A nail takes around 6 months to grow from base to the tip.
25. Each second 10,000,000 cells die and are replaced in your body.
26. Your liver performs over 500 functions in your body.
27. The average person spends 1/3 of their lifetime sleeping.
28. More germs are transferred when shaking hands than kissing.
29. The average person (from western culture) consumes 10 liters of alcohol per year.
30. Roughly 75% of people who play the radio in their car sing along to it.
31. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
32. Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
33. The human brain is composed of 75% water.
34. 70% of the composition of dust in your home is made up of shed human skin and hair.
35. The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
36. One human hair can support 3kg.
37. Humans are the only animals that cry tears and blush.
38. It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
39. If the normal one hundred thousand hairs on a head were woven into a rope, it could support a weight of more than twelve tons.
40. The fingernail grows about 1.5 inches per year.
41. The total amount of skin covering an adult human weighs 6 lbs.
42. The average person flexes the joints in their fingers 24 million times during a lifetime.
43. Each person inhales about seven quarts of air every minute.
44. On average, we breathe between 12 and 18 times a minute.
45. The average guy will grow about 27 feet of hair out of his face during his lifetime.
46. Approximately 1 out of 25 people suffers from asthma.
47. The average man sweats 2 1/2 quarts every day.
48. One out of every hundred American citizens is color blind.
49. An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
50. A human heart beats 100,000 times a day.

Found on this website: http://www.science-facts.com/amazing-human-facts/