Low Tech Anti-Gravity Device

Here's a low tech anti-gravity device anyone can make.
All you need is a cat, toast, and butter.



Here's how it works:

1. Toast always lands butter side down.
2. Cats always land on their feet.
3. Attach toast to back of cat.
4. Voila! Antigravity!!

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Posted in Cat Pictures , funny , science

What is this?

Looks like a modern abstract art piece, doesn't it?
These are pictures of polished stone - marble, granite, agate, and others.
Pretty, aren't they?

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Posted in Nature , science

One Big Egg !!

Wow! That's one big egg!
Is it real?



Yes it is...
Oh hey, here's another one.



These are eggs laid by Vorompatra (a.k.a. Aepyornis; Elephant Bird; Vouroupatra/Vouron Patra) - The largest bird known to science.



The Vorompatra (Aepyornis maximus) roamed the woodlands, marshes, and sand dunes of Madagascar until its relatively recent extinction. The bird laid the largest eggs known to have ever existed; these eggs may have inspired tales of the mythical elephant-lifting bird, the Roc (or Rukh) of the Arabian Nights. Man arrived on Madagascar about two millennia ago; hunting, egg predation, and gradual loss of habitat to agriculture all probably contributed to the demise of this ten foot tall, half-ton avian wonder.



Did Vorompatra really look like this picture? No one knows for sure.



Maybe he looked more like this.



Or this.



Vorompatra was a ratite, a bird which could not fly because its breast bone had no keel (the term derives from ratis, Latin for "raft"). This "keel" serves to anchor the strong musculature other birds need for powered flight. Flightless birds evolved early in the Cenozoic Era, when the departure of their dinosaur ancestors cleared the stage for the evolution of new megafauna--mammals and birds were free to move into the niches so long occupied by the "Terrible Lizards". Other ratites are still found throughout the southern hemisphere; this circumstance gave rise to the "traditional" theory that these birds originated on the former continent of Gondwana, but the lack of key supporting evidence for this idea calls it into question.



Here is an egg comparison created by the Wyoming Dinosaur Center
Eggs of various modern reptiles and birds:
Clockwise from the upper-left:

• an ostrich egg
• crocodile eggs
• one set of tortoise eggs
• another set of tortoise eggs
• and an Aepyornis Maximus egg
  (the extinct Elephant Bird of Madagascar).

All based on the same scale.
The ostrich egg is 145mm long.



Cool, huh?

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Posted in birds , largest , science

The Six Billion Dollar Experiment

It just might be the most complicated thing that humans have ever built. What is it? The Large Hadron Collider.



The Large Hadron Collider promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. By revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of the deepest secrets of our Universe. At Cern, the Large Hadron Collider could recreate conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.



Within these first few moments the building blocks of the Universe were created. The search for these fundamental particles has occupied scientists for decades but there remains one particle that has stubbornly refused to appear in any experiment. The Higgs Boson is so crucial to our understanding of the Universe that it has been dubbed the God particle. It explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, or as one scientist plainly states: "It is what makes stuff stuff..."



Here are some stats for you trivia fans:

• 20-year work-in-progress
• A team of 7,000 physicists from more than 80 nations
• 27 kilometers in circumference,
• 175 meters underground
• facilitating head-on collision of protons, traveling very near the speed-of-light
• each tunnel is big enough to run a train through it.
• temperatures generated: more than 1000,000 times hotter than the sun's core
• superconducting magnets are cooled to a temperature colder than in deep space

If you want to find out more about how it works, nytimes.com has a nifty explanation complete with graphics that move. It's pretty cool. Check it out here.

Still want to see more?
Here's a slide show.

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Posted in largest , science , slide show

Red Blood Cells - Up Close and Cool

A carpet of red blood cells clearly showing their typical biconcave disc shape. This highly flexible shape provides a large surface area for absorption and release of oxygen and carbon dioxide, and allows the cells to move easily through the finest of capillaries. (Colour-enhanced scanning electron micrograph by Dave McCarthy and Annie Cavanagh)

These pictures show different kinds of blood cells: Red blood cells, (erythrocytes, red), white blood cells (leukocytes, yellow, greenish), and platelets (thrombocytes, grey). The disc-shaped, biconcave erythrocytes transport oxygen to the body's cells and remove carbon dioxide to the lungs. Leukocytes are part of the immune system, defending the body against infection by ingesting pathogens by phagocytosis or by producing antibodies. Thrombocytes are involved with blood clotting. They gather at sites of injury and produce clotting factor.

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Posted in science

Science as Art

These colorized images were taken with an electron microscope.
The complexity and the intricacy of the world around us when magnified is just stunning, don't you think?

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Posted in Art , science