Science! (10 Viewers)

Buddhism has been teaching a Universal Consciousness for 2500 years. It's in the notion that we are all interconnected, whether we like it or not, with every other being and object in the Universe.

The Popol Vuh as well. Further, the Popol Vuh says that Tepeu and Gucumatz created man out of wood and corn, and we share ~50% of DNA with plants. Excuse me while I go pull someone's heart out of their chest. *


* Dear FBI: that was a joke.
 
Humanity has yet to find extraterrestrial life, but a new study suggests that the exomoons of 'rogue planets' could be a good place to look.

The research notes that rogue exoplanets - planets outside the Solar System that are not associated with a star - that have their own moon could have conditions that are ripe for atmospheres and liquid water, thanks to cosmic radiation and the planet's tidal forces.

Tidal forces from the planet on the moon could be a source of heat to keep the water in a liquid state, the researchers said in a statement.

If carbon dioxide is 90 percent of the moon's atmosphere, there could be a great enough greenhouse effect to retain the heat and keep the water liquid.

'Together, these energy sources would suffice to keep water in the liquid state.'

It's unclear how many rogue exoplanets there are, but 'conservative estimates' suggest the Milky Way hosts 'at least as many Jupiter-sized orphan planets as there are stars,' the statement added.

The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, making it a strong possibility there are over 100 billion of these so-called planetary nomads............

 
There's a mystery brewing at the center of the Earth.

Scientists can only see it when they study the seismic waves (subterranean tremors generated by earthquakes) passing through the planet's solid iron inner core. For some reason, waves move through the core significantly faster when they're traveling between the north and south poles than when they're traveling across the equator.

Researchers have known about this discrepancy — known as seismic anisotropy — for decades, but have been unable to come up with an explanation that's consistent with the available data. Now, using computer simulations of the core's growth over the last billion years, a new study in the June 3 issue of Nature Geoscience offers a solution that finally seems to fit: Every year, little by little, Earth's inner core is growing in a "lopsided" pattern, with new iron crystals forming faster on the east side of the core than on the west side.

"The movement of liquid iron in the outer core carries heat away from the inner core, causing it to freeze," lead study author Daniel Frost, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science. "So this means the outer core has been taking more heat from the east side [under Indonesia] than the west [under Brazil]."

To visualize this lopsided growth in the core, imagine a tree trunk with growth rings radiating out from a central point, Frost said — but "the center of the rings is offset from the center of the tree," so that rings are spaced further apart on the east side of the tree and closer together on the west side.

A cross section of Earth's inner core might look similar to that. However, this asymmetric growth doesn't mean that the inner core itself is misshapen or at risk of becoming imbalanced, the researchers said.

On average, the inner core's radius grows evenly by about 0.04 inches (1 millimeter) every year. Gravity corrects for the lopsided growth in the east by pushing new crystals toward the west. There, the crystals clump into lattice structures that stretch along the core's north-south axis. These crystal structures, aligned parallel with Earth's poles, are seismic superhighways that enable earthquake waves to travel more quickly in that direction, according to the team's models............


core poster.jpg
 
There's something strange near the galactic center.

Some 25,000 light-years from Earth, astronomers have found a weird star that almost blinked out of existence for several months before reappearing.

Astronomers believe the star, named VVV-WIT-08, could belong to a new class of star - giant beasts over 100 times the Sun that are eclipsed by a mysterious orbiting body once every few decades.

Stars with peculiar dimming signatures are an endless fascination. Although space is mostly relatively empty, it stands to reason that, with all the stuff out there, some of it will line up in such a way that stars are dimmed from our terrestrial perspective from time to time.

It's not always easy to tell what that stuff is, though. A giant planet? Space dust? Debris from a disrupted object? A cosmic dragon?

The case of VVV-WIT-08 is a doozy. Although other stars have exhibited similar dips in light, none have been so deep. The culprit, astronomers think, could be another star or planet, surrounded by a thick, opaque disk of dust on a long orbit around VVV-WIT-08, that covers the star completely when it passes in front of our view.

"It's amazing that we just observed a dark, large and elongated object pass between us and the distant star and we can only speculate what its origin is," said astronomer Sergey Koposov from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

The model of an orbital companion with a giant disk isn't without precedent. One famous, well-known example is Epsilon Aurigae, a supergiant star and with a disk-shrouded companion on a 27-year orbit that dims the star by about 50 percent for up to 730 days.

Then there's the system TYC 2505-672-1, a red giant star with a dusty companion on a 69-year orbit that eclipses the star for a period of 3.5 years...........

 
This is more history than science but I'll put it here
==================================

For the past 200 years, tales of discovering Antarctica have centered on Russian, European and American expeditions. But a new study suggests that New Zealand’s Māori explorers could have been the first humans to set eyes on the frozen continent as far back as the seventh century.

Polynesian stories of historic voyages include the expeditions of Hui Te Rangiora and his crew on the vessel Te Ivi o Atea into Antarctic waters, likely in the 600s, according to a new study published this month in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

In some of these stories, Hui Te Rangiora and his crew travelled far south and in so doing were likely the first people to set eyes on Antarctic waters and perhaps even the continent, according to the authors of the report..............

 
On rainy days, Kaitlyn Loftus likes to imagine herself somewhere else. Not on a sun-soaked beach, but on another world in the middle of its own rainstorm. Beneath the swirling storms of Jupiter or Saturn’s hazy cloud tops, where helium drops from the sky. On Neptune, where it might drizzle diamonds. Maybe Titan, a moon of Saturn, where methane rain can fill entire lakes.

Loftus is a planetary scientist at Harvard, and for her, otherworldly rain is more than a daydream. She and her colleagues recently studied how liquid droplets might behave as they descend from the clouds of different worlds, on the planets and moons in our solar system and distant planets around other stars. The team had expected to find quite a bit of variation; the conditions on Earth, after all, bear little resemblance to the environments of the other celestial bodies we know. Of the exoplanets that astronomers have discovered so far, some of them have weird characteristics—rocky surfaces so stretchy they resemble toffee, puffy atmospheres that might as well be planetary cotton candy, toasty worlds hotter than most stars.

Instead, their research suggests that raindrops on other worlds may not be so different from those on our own. Liquid droplets, whether they’re made of water or something more unusual, fall to the ground as spherical blobs that are roughly the same size. The biggest methane raindrops on Titan, for example, would only be about twice the size of the biggest water raindrops on Earth.

In one sense, the similarities across worlds are not so surprising. The universe is full of echoes, from the basic composition of atoms and molecules to the fundamental forces that shape planets and galaxies. But there is something especially intriguing, even comforting, about finding uniformity in a phenomenon that seems so distinctly Earthlike, so specific to our existence as beings on this planet.............

 
A map of a fragment of a human brain reveals for the first time its astonishing intricacy, while providing new evidence of both the brain's physical structure and one of the ways it's thought to function.

The map is the culmination of years of work by scientists to trace the vast network of cells and connections within the sample, which was taken roughly a decade ago from the brain of a patient undergoing surgery to prevent serious epileptic seizures.

Although the sample is just a tiny fraction of an inch across — about half the size of a sesame seed — it contains more than 50,000 brain cells, or neurons, and roughly 130 million of the thread-like axons that transmit signals between them. But it's only about a millionth of the volume of an entire human brain, which is estimated to consist of about 100 billion cells............

 
On rainy days, Kaitlyn Loftus likes to imagine herself somewhere else. Not on a sun-soaked beach, but on another world in the middle of its own rainstorm. Beneath the swirling storms of Jupiter or Saturn’s hazy cloud tops, where helium drops from the sky. On Neptune, where it might drizzle diamonds. Maybe Titan, a moon of Saturn, where methane rain can fill entire lakes.

Loftus is a planetary scientist at Harvard, and for her, otherworldly rain is more than a daydream. She and her colleagues recently studied how liquid droplets might behave as they descend from the clouds of different worlds, on the planets and moons in our solar system and distant planets around other stars. The team had expected to find quite a bit of variation; the conditions on Earth, after all, bear little resemblance to the environments of the other celestial bodies we know. Of the exoplanets that astronomers have discovered so far, some of them have weird characteristics—rocky surfaces so stretchy they resemble toffee, puffy atmospheres that might as well be planetary cotton candy, toasty worlds hotter than most stars.

Instead, their research suggests that raindrops on other worlds may not be so different from those on our own. Liquid droplets, whether they’re made of water or something more unusual, fall to the ground as spherical blobs that are roughly the same size. The biggest methane raindrops on Titan, for example, would only be about twice the size of the biggest water raindrops on Earth.

In one sense, the similarities across worlds are not so surprising. The universe is full of echoes, from the basic composition of atoms and molecules to the fundamental forces that shape planets and galaxies. But there is something especially intriguing, even comforting, about finding uniformity in a phenomenon that seems so distinctly Earthlike, so specific to our existence as beings on this planet.............

Weird. This article reminded me of that movie All Summer In A Day

It's a movie about kids living on Venus where it always rains and they have never seen the sun. I haven't seen that movie since I was like 10 years old much less thought of it
 

It's just amazing how even with such a plentiful, simple, common substance that we have been making for 6000 years, there is/was so much we don't know
 
very trippy stuff
===============

In upcoming research, scientists will attempt to show the universe has consciousness. Yes, really. No matter the outcome, we’ll soon learn more about what it means to be conscious—and which objects around us might have a mind of their own.

What will that mean for how we treat objects and the world around us? Buckle in, because things are about to get weird.

What Is Consciousness?​

The basic definition of consciousness intentionally leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It’s “the normal mental condition of the waking state of humans, characterized by the experience of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, awareness of the external world, and often in humans (but not necessarily in other animals) self-awareness,” according to the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology.

Scientists simply don’t have one unified theory of what consciousness is. We also don’t know where it comes from, or what it’s made of.

However, one loophole of this knowledge gap is that we can’t exhaustively say other organisms, and even inanimate objects, don’t have consciousness. Humans relate to animals and can imagine, say, dogs and cats have some amount of consciousness because we see their facial expressions and how they appear to make decisions. But just because we don’t “relate to” rocks, the ocean, or the night sky, that isn’t the same as proving those things don’t have consciousness.

This is where a philosophical stance called panpsychism comes into play, writes All About Space’s David Crookes:


It’s also where physics enters the picture. Some scientists have posited that the thing we think of as consciousness is made of micro-scale quantum physics events and other “spooky actions at a distance,” somehow fluttering inside our brains and generating conscious thoughts................

God...is that you?


:hihi:
 

Create an account or login to comment

You must be a member in order to leave a comment

Create account

Create an account on our community. It's easy!

Log in

Already have an account? Log in here.

Users who are viewing this thread

    Back
    Top Bottom