Hubble's Festive View of a Grand Star-Forming Region

Just in time for the holidays: a Hubble Space Telescope picture postcard of hundreds of brilliant blue stars wreathed by warm, glowing clouds. The festive portrait is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood. The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus. Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are over 100 times more massive than our Sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years.

The image, taken in ultraviolet, visible, and red light by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, spans about 100 light-years. The nebula is close enough to Earth that Hubble can resolve individual stars, giving astronomers important information about the birth and evolution of stars in the universe. The Hubble observations were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009. The blue color is light from the hottest, most massive stars; the green from the glow of oxygen; and the red from fluorescing hydrogen.

See Picture Here

Meteor Over Utah 11-18-2009

At 1am it looked like the middle of the day.

This is a news story from KSL about a meteor that streaked through the sky on November 18th, 2009. It lit the whole sky up making it appear like day. Several surveillance cameras around Utah caught...

HELLO FROM EARTH - celebrate the International Year of Astronomy

COSMOS magazine, thought it would be a cool way to celebrate National Science Week in Australia - and the International Year of Astronomy - by sending a message to a potentially habitable planet outside the Solar System.

HELLO FROM EARTH is collecting messages that will be transmitted to Gliese 581d, a planet outside our Solar System which may support life.





Will we get an answer? No-one really knows. So why not send a message and find out? (since it will take 20years to get there dont expect a reply untill 2049)

http://www.hellofromearth.net/

Why We Get Fat

This is a great lecture by Gary Taubes an American science writer. The movie is 72 minutes long but well worth it!

Message:

-Great video on diet in general

-An interesting point in the video: Eating less doesn't work with weight loss, neither does exercising more.

-Here are some good quotes form the lecture:

"Insulin is the only hormone that tells your body to retain fat." - Gary Taubes

"Fat is mobilized [from fat tissue] when insulin secretion diminishes." -American Medical Association council on foods and nutrition 1974

Origins: The Heart Symbol

Silphium is found in the coinage of Cyrene,

which features a seed pod of the revered plant.

Over 400 years before Jesus walked the earth the heart symobl was used on silver coins from Cyrene.

The symbol appears to be an image of the seed or the fruit (Silphium) the sad thing is the plant is now extincted it used to grow in Cyrenaica (in present-day Libya)

Pliny reported that the last known stalk of silphium was given to the Emperor Nero "as a curiosity"

Contemporaneous writings help tie silphium to sexuality and love, as laserpicium makes an appearance in a poem (Catullus 7) of Catullus to his lover Lesbia. As well as in Pausanias' Description of Greece in which he says "For it so happened that his maiden daughter was living in it. By the next day this maiden and all her girlish apparel had disappeared, and in the room were found images of the Dioscuri, a table, and silphium upon it."

The true nature of silphium may never be known but i think it is amzing how the human heart - the repository and the embodiment of romantic love - is always drawn stylized instead of in the natural shape of the human heart organ? The answer is rooted in the ancient function of Silphium!