StarShip Will @starshipwill - Tumblr Blog

Amber lives for the drive.

This game is so much fun.

Astronauts don’t typically drink soda or other carbonated beverages while in space. The reason is probably apparent if you watch this new video of an effervescent tablet in water on the space station (or, you could watch the older classic one from Don Pettit). Unlike on Earth, where the carbon dioxide bubbles are buoyant and rise to the surface, the bubbles in a fluid in microgravity are randomly distributed. Those few bubbles that happen to be located along the edge of the water sphere will sometimes burst, creating the halo of tiny droplets you see in the video. In the case of sodas, though, the bubbles’ behavior creates a foamy mess, and, after ingestion, the bubbles are stuck travelling through the astronaut’s digestive system instead of getting burped out. Sounds rather unpleasant to me. (Video credit: NASA; submitted by entropy-perturbation and buckitdrop)

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LAST CALL: Help us do some science! I’ve teamed up with researcher Paige Brown Jarreau to create a survey of FYFD readers. By participating, you’ll be helping me improve FYFD and contributing to novel academic research on the readers of science blogs. It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete. You can find the survey here.

christinetheastrophysicist

Messenger’s Collision Course with Mercury

Earlier today, the MESSENGER spacecraft that was studying Mercury ended its mission by crashing into the planet. MESSENGER’s objective was to study and understand the first planet in our Solar System. Over four years, MESSENGER exhausted all of its fuel, resulting in today’s collision.

Jonathan Corum of the New York Times published this interactive piece on the MESSENGER spacecraft. It talks about MESSENGER’s mission and what it learned about Mercury.

typhlonectes

Astrophysicists Create The Most Comprehensive Map Of The Universe Yet

by Caroline Reid

Astrophysicists have collated an impressive amount of data on galaxies as far away as 2 billion light-years from Earth and created a world first: the most complete map of the cosmos yet! The map is spherical and three-dimensional, and also shows the location and mass distribution of galaxies.

It takes cosmological maps to the next level by tracking the motion of the galaxies through the heavens. Previous models of the universe don’t take motion into account. It is these extra details that will help astrophysicists further their research into some of the secrets of space. The work has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This map should also give scientists a helping hand when trying to puzzle out how much dark matter is in the universe and how it is distributed. From the size, velocity and distribution of the visible galaxies, they can infer the locations that dark matter exists and explain the placement of galaxies…

(read more: I Fucking Love Science)

image via: University of Waterloo

realcleverscience

Pretty cool. Click through for the videos. It’s kinda like watching an MRI of the universe.

mindblowingscience

Cerebral cortex in rats’ brains is set up like the Internet

Researchers sketching out a wiring diagram for rat brains — a field known as “connectomics” — have discovered that its structure is organized like the Internet. For years, scientists looking for clues to brain function through its structure focused on what could be seen — the brain’s lobes, grooves and folds. Now, with a more comprehensive picture of how neurons connect to one another, they’ve discovered local networks of neurons layered like the shells in a Russian nesting doll. “The cerebral cortex is like a mini-Internet,” said Larry Swanson, professor at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and corresponding author of a paper on the discovery. “The Internet has countless local area networks that then connect with larger, regional networks and ultimately with the backbone of the Internet. The brain operates in a similar way.” The study was published on April 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

realcleverscience

So this is pretty interesting, just from a networking angle. But also cool to see the progress we’re making lately in unlocking the brain. The greatest frontier to science today, imho.

earthstory

Time Lapse Art

No, this photo wasn’t taken while traveling at warp speed – but it was moving pretty quickly relative to my reference frame. NASA Astronaut Don Petit captured this long-exposure shot from the International Space Station – the long light trails are the cities and light sources of the planet Earth recorded as they streak below the station, and the lights of the aurora and star trails are caught in the background as well. Not 100% sure but I think the single light bursts that don’t stretch out are lightning.

This image was shared as part of UNESCO’s 2015 Year of Light activities – focusing on the different types of science and art that we piece together or pull apart using the amazing properties of light.

-JBB

Image credit: http://lightexhibit.org/bio_image45.html

More: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/