A tornado of plasma on the sun. The tornado is 100 000 kilometers tall, 10 times the diameter of the Earth.
What a trip through a wormhole would look like
It would be the trip of a lifetime: travelling through a wormhole to emerge near Pluto or in a galaxy millions of light years away. Now you can see what an epic journey through a tunnel in space-time might look like, thanks to an animation by astrophysicist Andrew Hamilton from University of Colorado at Boulder.
First, you free fall through the outer horizon of a black hole. Once you reach its inner horizon, you see an infinitely-energetic flash of light from the outside world containing an image of the entire history of the universe. In a real black hole you would be vaporised by the burst, but the visualisation assumes you have superpowers to survive it.
As you emerge from the black hole, you enter a wormhole where the flow of space turns around and you start to accelerate back outward. The wormhole ends at the entrance to a white hole, which is a time-reversed version of a black hole. Instead of falling inward, space falls outwards at a speed faster than light. Soon you experience another flash of radiation, this time containing a picture of the entire future of the universe.
Moving through the white hole, you see a third flash of light as you reach its outer horizon. This time, a new universe appears, containing an image of its entire past. As the camera turns around, you can see the white hole from which you emerged and an image of the old universe.
Although this is as close as you’ll get to a wormhole journey at the moment, new theories of gravity could make such trips possible. To find out more, read our full-length feature, Intergalactic subway: All aboard the wormhole express.
If you enjoyed this video, check out our Seeing Relativity series to experience, for example, a mind-bending tour of the solar system or a ride on a light-speed rollercoaster.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
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| — | Albert Einstein (via expose-the-light) |
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Tomoko Kina - “Hana”.
Ry Cooder plays slide guitar solo and mandolin.
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
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| — | Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus (via phredology) |
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN. This is Your Brain on Stress.
Want something else to worry about? Worry about worrying too much. The evidence is building that chronically elevated stress shrinks your brain!
A study in press at the journal Biological Psychiatry asked 103 people about how often they had experienced stressful events, both recently and over the course of their lifetimes, as well as about their chronic ongoing stress, and then took functional magnetic resonance images of their brain. The more stress, the smaller the brain…in several particular cortical areas.
Inside the Heart
Photograph by Lennart Nilsson
Tissue-paper thin but tough, the valves of the human heart open and close to pump 6 quarts (0.9 liters) of blood a day through 60,000 miles (97,000 kilometers) of vessels. That’s equivalent to 20 treks across the United States from coast to coast. The heart is a magnificent machine when it’s in good working order. But coronary heart disease is the number one killer of American men as well as women, resulting in 500,000 deaths in the United States and killing 7.2 million people worldwide each year.
I am a big fan of Ted Talks and RSA Animate videos. I think they are incredibly educational; and the RSA Animates, specifically, are very easy to digest as the drawings help to engage all parts of the brain.
Here are a few that speak, in my opinion, directly to the…
Grace Hopper: The gifted mathematician and pioneer by Charis Tsevis.
We’re flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We’ve tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question. — Grace Hopper
Our separation of each other is an optical illusion of consciousness.
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Albert Einstein (via infinity-imagined ) |
A couple is photographed moments after learning that their 19-month-old child had been swept out to sea at Hermosa Beach. That morning, Times photographer Jack Gaunt was at his beachfront home when he heard a neighbor shout, “Something’s happening on the beach!” Gaunt grabbed his Rolleiflex camera and headed toward the shoreline. His photograph appeared on the front page of The Times the next day. The image won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for press photography; the Pulitzer committee called the photo “poignant and profoundly moving.” But for Gaunt, the image was hard to bear at first, his daughter recalled in Gaunt’s 2007 Times obituary.
View 130 photos for The Times’ 130th birthday on Framework.
Photo credit: Jack Gaunt / Los Angeles Time
Life as we grow it
When the news was reported in May 2010, some of the first headlines were not surprisingly sensational: “Scientist accused of playing God after creating artificial life by making designer microbe from scratch - but could it wipe out humanity?” screamed The Mail in the UK.
Obviously a bit breathless and over-the-top, but J. Craig Venter’s announcement that he and colleagues had created a “synthetic cell” by inserting a chemically constructed genome into a Mycoplasma bacterium, and then inducing it to successfully propagate, was – and is – a notable achievement. “This is a philosophical advance as much as a technical advance,” Venter told The New York Times, suggesting that the work (published in Science) raised new questions about the nature of life.
Just how notable or paradigm-shifting Venter’s creation proves to be remains to be seen. The synthetic organism, seen above in this scanning electron micrograph produced by Tom Deerinck and Mark Ellisman at NCMIR, is inarguably a technical feat. Venter and colleagues synthesized a million units of bacterial DNA and got them to functionally replace the bacterium’s natural counterparts. “This is the first synthetic cell that’s been made, and we call it synthetic because the cell is totally derived from a synthetic chromosome, made with four bottles of chemicals on a chemical synthesizer, starting with information in a computer,” said Venter.
Ultimately, the goal is to achieve complete control over a bacterium’s genome so that researchers can routinely remove, replace and rearrange genes to create new microorganisms capable of unprecedented functions, such as gobbling oil spills or secreting drugs.
That day hasn’t arrived. The editors at The Mail can relax. Humanity remains safe.
