… if he could have understood what was being pictured. Here is a rendering of our Sun using not visible light, or X-rays, or IR photons. This picture was constructed using neutrinos. This is a ‘neutrinograph’ of the Sun. Neutrinos, like photons, are produced in the nuclear reactions that drive the Sun; unlike photons, neutrinos interact with matter only very weakly (typically taking light-years thickness of lead to be stopped rather than a thin piece of paper). These Solar neutrinos were captured by one of the few neutrino detectors to have some directional capability, enabling a picture to be accumulated from individual neutrino detections.
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Daguerre would have been amazed…
Wednesday, December 20th, 2006Look back in time
Friday, December 8th, 2006Stunning (if not very detailed) pictures of the NASA Viking Mars probes (launched 1976/1977) taken from orbit by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are now available. The Beeb has a brief description too.
For people as old as me who remember the Viking landings and good ol’ Carl Sagan waxing lyrical about it, seeing those probes pop up in the news again, revisited by another generation of technology, brings a nostalgic glow to my breast.
Mind you, they’re probably up on bricks by now, their parts on the Martian equivalent of eBay.
Back for the future
Tuesday, December 5th, 2006As someone who tries (and fails) to minimize my back strain whilst earning my daily wage at a desk and PC all day, I keep a wary eye out for information about posture, screen height, and so on. Now we all know that we should be sitting upright when typing, yes? Well, there’s some new evidence to suggest that it’s not the best position. The research suggests that lying back (halfway between prone and upright) is better than upright or slouching forwards.
300 years of Royal Society publications free . . .
Thursday, September 14th, 2006. . . for the next couple of months. Ever wanted to read the original papers by Crick and Watson or Maxwell’s original work on the propagation of light? Well, now you can. The past 300-odd years of scientific discovery is open to inspection. Davies’ paper on Hawking evaporation is a goodie too!
Update: Sorry about this, but the TinyURLs used above to link to the RS pages don’t work consistently (probably because the RS site seems to be re-writing the incoming URI), but they generally point there and the search page is correctly linked.
And Thag makes three
Monday, July 10th, 2006It’s official: the spiky club at the rear end of a stegosaur’s tail is really called a Thagomizer, named from the Gary Larson cartoon. The Smithsonian Institute has agreed it. Larson’s popularity has now spawned a name for a beetle and one for a louse.
A busy day on the Web
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006Several interesting stories have popped up today and as I’m short of thinking time, I’ll just post them for reference and rumination:
- Microsoft can’t hold out much longer;
- Belgium ‘does a Massachusetts’ and moves towards Open Documentation;
- There’s another study that shows that mobiles significantly interact with the brain;
- A Google-backed company is trying to kick-start Open WiFi Clouds with a $5 router offer.
What a day out there on the Electron Sea.
Aliens discovered on planet Earth
Thursday, June 1st, 2006Just when you think the world hasn’t got much in the way of surprizes left, scientists discover a cave that’s been sealed off by its geology for five million years. Let’s say that again and roll it around a bit: this cave last saw the light of day at a time before humans – the Australopithicenes, brow-ridges, tiny brains, and all, had yet to branch off to form Homo habilis, our modern ancestor. For five million years, creatures and their ancestors have lived trapped in the dark, breeding and evolving, and now they’ve been found. Eight living, completely unknown species of crustacean, their DNA unlike anything alive today, have been discovered.