Every nanosecond of every day, for millennia and eons, the atom has been hard at work construct every thing in the universe, from the air we breathe to the stars. But it hasn’t been a lack-luster job, as it seems, because apparently the atoms are still singing. Ever imagine what an atom were to sound like if we could hear it moving around? Well it turns out that some researchers have done just that, and they’re saying it sounds like a resounding D-note, 20 octaves above the highest note on a piano.
Only weeks ago there was news of not one, but three sequels to the largest film the industry has ever known—Avatar. Proclaimed to be the box-office winner of all time, grossing approximately $2.8 billion worldwide in 2009, James Cameron's "Avatar" was one for the record-books. A shockingly realistic portrayal of a far off alien civilization on the planet Pandora, the film was the first of its kind in creating an entire existence, along with a language and a planet filled with new species. But it turns out that one may have been hidden here on Earth.
Adjusting the evolutionary clock back quite a bit, three newly discovered fossils in China’s Liaoning province reveal that mammals may have roamed the Earth with their dinosaur companions, long before previously thought.
In the common eye, the king of the world of dinosaurs is undoubtedly the Tyrannosaurus rex. But the common misperception is simply not true… there was a dinosaur bigger and far more terrifying than the T. rex. One that conquered land an sea—the Spinosaurus.
In a full-disk view of our very own sun, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory discovered that this morning, Sept. 10, a giant solar storm erupted in the center of the star. Typically non-disruptive, in spite of the high-energy emissions from the fusion/fission reactions that take place on the sun’s outer surface, today’s storm is causing some concern over what affect it might have on us, three planets away from the star.
As a close-second to Earth, as our solar system’s best candidate for alien life, Jupiter’s moon Europa has been the center of conversation for decades. With cold icy shell a stark difference from the warm, live surface of Earth, Europa was thought to perhaps be a different type of host to alien species. However, less than a year after plumes of water vapor were documented erupting from Europa’s southern pole, a new study reveals that the frozen surface may be much more Earth-like than thought before.
Earlier this summer the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission marked its first success in arriving to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. And with the whole world watching via their consistently updated #CometWatch newsfeed, it begged the question, once in its orbit what would be the Rosetta’s first mission objective. Well thanks to the magic of interstellar twitter feeds, which can apparently even be updated in space, we learned that the Rosetta’s first landmark moment was a once-in-a-lifetime selfie.
After a 169-day stint in space, two Russian cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut finally touched down on Earth at 8:24am this Thursday morning, Sept. 11.
