Pipe Nebula

Saturns north pole hexagon.

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Very strange things happen to your body if you spend a year in space

NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly returns to Earth Tuesday night after spending almost a year in space.

But his 340 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS) haven’t been all fun and games.

Our bodies evolved on Earth, so they’re not built for weightlessness — which is exactly why NASA plans to use Kelly to study the long-term effects of spaceflight the human body.

Better late than never!

This week’s comic: Rogue Planets

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/13/a-guide-to-lonely-planets-in-the-galaxy/

http://www.space.com/11699-rogue-alien-planets-milky-common.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAsACBDi_sk

What is Math?

Mathematics is everywhere and we all learned it at some point, but what is mathematics, really? A search on the internet will yield many different interpretations. According to Google, mathematics is “the abstract science of number, quantity, and space.” Here is a collection of how some of history’s greatest minds described mathematics.

An intellectual game “Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.”—David Hilbert

“Pure mathematics is the world’s best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It’s free. It can be played anywhere—Archimedes did it in a bathtub.”—Richard J. Trudeau

“Mathematics is about making up rules and seeing what happens.”—Vi Hart

“Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young, not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state.”—Plato

“Mathematics is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.”—William Woods Worth

A tool for the sciences “Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.”—Paul Dirac

“Our physical world doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties.”—Max Tegmark

“Mathematics serves as a handmaiden for the explanation of the quantitative situations in other subjects …”—H. F. Fehr

“In order to understand the universe, you must know the language in which it is written. And that language is mathematics.”—Galileo

A search for pattern, order, and structure “A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”—G. H. Hardy

“Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.”—Joseph Fourier

“Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.”—Dean Schlicter

Logic and reasoning “All Mathematics is Symbolic Logic.”—Bertrand Russell

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” –Albert Einstein

“Mathematics is the supreme judge; from its decisions there is no appeal.“—Tobias Dantzig

Which do you believe best describe math?

Quartz Var. Eisenkiesel

Locality: Tinejdad Mine, Er Rachidia Province, Meknès-Tafilalet Region, Morocco

Dark Blue Azurite on Limonite

Locality:  Touissit, Touissit District, Jerada Province, Oriental Region, Morocco.

Messier 1 - The Crab Nebula

Potentially Humanity’s First Historically Observed Supernova

The Crab Nebula is the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion. Around in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers identified a large bright object that suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. The explosion was so bright that it was even visible during the day time.

700 years later the super nova remnant faded in brightness as it expanded and was nearly forgotten. The Super Nova Remnant was rediscovered in 1758 ( officially re-recorded) by Charles Messier while he was creating a catalog of mysterious objects that looked like comets but were not.

We now know that the beautiful Crab Nebula is the magnificent result of the death of a star, which was unknown to Charles Messier and the Chinese Astronomers that discovered the Object. Now, thanks to space telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, we can image the Nebula in great detail. The bottom left image is of a small region of the Crab Nebula. It shows “Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in its intricate filamentary structure” and gives scientists a better understanding of the death of stars. The image to the bottom left shows combined visible light data from Hubble and x-ray data from Chandra.

Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra

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