Archive for the 'Off Topic' Category
‘Welcome to Jupiter’: NASA Mission Puts Juno in Orbit After Five-Year Journey
July 5th, 2016Via: Guardian: After a five-year voyage across 1.8bn miles (2.8bn km), Nasa’s Juno spacecraft has reached Jupiter and successfully entered its orbit. … Juno’s mission is to peer through Jupiter’s cloud-socked atmosphere and map the interior from a unique vantage point above the poles. Among the lingering questions: How much water exists? Is there a […]
Yes, There Have Been Aliens
June 11th, 2016Via: New York Times: LAST month astronomers from the Kepler spacecraft team announced the discovery of 1,284 new planets, all orbiting stars outside our solar system. The total number of such “exoplanets” confirmed via Kepler and other methods now stands at more than 3,000. This represents a revolution in planetary knowledge. A decade or so […]
Flat Lens Promises Possible Revolution in Optics
June 4th, 2016Via: BBC: A flat lens made of paint whitener on a sliver of glass could revolutionise optics, according to its US inventors. Just 2mm across and finer than a human hair, the tiny device can magnify nanoscale objects and gives a sharper focus than top-end microscope lenses. It is the latest example of the power […]
Never10: Very Easily Pull the Plug on Windows 7 or 8.1 Updating to Windows 10
June 4th, 2016Never10 very easily allows you to prevent Windows 7 and 8.1 from updating to Windows 10. It can also remove the Windows 10 installation blob if it has already downloaded to your system. Never10 is tiny, free, doesn’t require installation and, after two clicks (max), you’re finished.
Building Blocks of Life Found in Comet’s Atmosphere
May 30th, 2016Via: Space: For the first time, scientists have directly detected a crucial amino acid and a rich selection of organic molecules in the dusty atmosphere of a comet, further bolstering the hypothesis that these icy objects delivered some of life’s ingredients to Earth. The amino acid glycine, along with some of its precursor organic molecules […]
Quebec Teen Discovers Ancient Mayan Ruins by Studying the Stars
May 11th, 2016Update: That Long-Lost Mayan City a Teen Found Isn’t Lost… Or a City Via: Wired: Geoffrey Braswell, a mesoamerican archaeologist at UC San Diego, and his graduate students have, by coincidence, actually been working in this area, and they immediately recognized the features in the satellite photos. The first image, Braswell says, is of the […]
SpaceX Plans to Send Dragon Spacecraft to Mars in 2018
April 27th, 2016Via: Ars Technica: SpaceX announced Wednesday that it intends to begin sending uncrewed Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018. This is the first step in the company’s plan to one day land humans on Mars, which is the goal founder Elon Musk set for SpaceX when he created the company in 2002.
‘Wow!’ Signal Could be Explained After Almost 40 Years
April 15th, 2016Via: Guardian: He didn’t find aliens but he did find two suspicious looking comets. Known as 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs, they have never been investigated before because they were only discovered in 2006 and 2008 respectively. Paris found that they were both in the vicinity of Chi Sagittarii on the day that the ‘Wow!’ signal was […]
Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy
March 14th, 2016Via: Quanta Magazine: Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them. Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending […]
Singapore Math and Zaner-Bloser Textbooks in New Zealand
February 21st, 2016We keep meeting homeschooling families who are having math and writing curricula issues in NZ, so here’s a quick post for anyone else going through this: If you’re a homeschooling parent in New Zealand, you probably realize that getting quality materials here can be a challenge. Lots of us know that Singapore Math and Zaner-Bloser […]
