plutoisnotaplanet

Latest Posts by plutoisnotaplanet

I remember first learning that you can cry from any emotion, that emotions are chemical levels in your brain and your body is constantly trying to maintain equilibrium. so if one emotion sky rockets, that chemical becomes flagged and signals the tear duct to open as an exit to release that emotion packaged neatly within a tear. Everything made sense after learning that. That sudden stability of your emotions after crying. How crying is often accompanied by the inability to feel any other emotion in that precise moment. And it is especially beautiful knowing that it is even possible to experience so much beauty or love or happiness that your body literally can’t hold on to all of it. So what I’ve learned is that crying signifies that you are feeling as much as humanely possible and that is living to the fullest extent. So keep feeling and cry often and as much as needed

Maki Naro @ The Nib

Octopus and squid evolution is officially weirder than we could have ever imagined

Just when we thought octopuses couldn’t be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.

In a surprising twist, scientists have discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.

This is weird because that’s really not how adaptations usually happen in multicellular animals. When an organism changes in some fundamental way, it typically starts with a genetic mutation - a change to the DNA.

The findings have been published in Cell.

Olga Visavi/Shutterstock

never forget pluto. i love you son

domestication syndrome is one of the coolest findings from recent genetics

“Pluto, the newest planet,” & “Neptune, next to farthest planet.” Buck Rogers’ Space World. ca. 1940.  Rumsey. Chart detail.

good one @nasa

Chocolate bar in Microwave (Part-II)

This diagram of the electromagnetic spectrum finds it place in all physics textbooks:

                                             Source

But the problem was I never got a physical sense of what that meant. It remained ‘yet another physics diagram’ for a really long time.

You see, unlike sound which can be neatly visualized using Schlieren imagery

                                       Source: NPR

or by other unconventional innovative means,

I had no idea how to even get started with electromagnetic waves.

Visualizing the microwave wavelength using a chocolate and an oven (although not my original idea) arose out of this need to understand microwaves a little better.  (Check out part-I of this post)*

But you can do more with some better but less delicious equipment.

You can get a couple of neon bulbs from an electronics shop and place them in a grid inside the microwave to view the standing wave while the microwave is in action

                                                    Source

This tells you how the heat is distributed at the bottom of the microwave oven. The lit bulbs are anti-nodes and unlit ones are the nodes .

You can also try (NOT recommended) to do this by placing a light bulb inside a cup of water instead of a neon bulbs.

                                  Better quality gif  - here              

As you can clearly see the bulb only lights up in the anti-node regions of the standing wave while the remaining regions are the nodes.

You can take this a step further if you have an infrared camera .

Mark Rober had this brilliant idea of using the infrared camera inside a microwave in order to ensure that food that is being microwaved is cooked evenly and completely on the inside.                          

                                              Source

And ElectroBOOM then took this to the next level by placing a cardboard box inside a microwave oven and looking at the heat map using a infrared camera.

                                    Source: ElectroBOOM                                            

That last gif my dear friends was the most satisfying physics animation that I had ever seen for a really long time ! It clearly illustrates the 3D standing wave heat map that is produced inside a microwave oven.

Although these aren’t the only ways to visualize the standing microwave pattern inside a microwave oven, but these are the ones that I was able to test them out with equipment that you can probably find at home or at school/university.

You are welcome to suggest more thought experiments, alternate methods or edits to this post, I would highly appreciate it!

Have a good one!

* Previous post: Chocolate bar in Microwave (Part-I)

** Why is wavelength of light important than its frequency ?                                                                            

This was the crossword puzzle in the New York Times yesterday. 

Tausig’s crossword is a so-called Schrödinger puzzle, named for the physicist’s hypothetical cat that is at once both alive and dead. In a Schrödinger puzzle, select squares have more than one correct letter answer: They exist in two states at once. “Black Halloween animal,” for example, could be both BAT or CAT, yielding two different but perfectly correct puzzles. Only 10 such puzzles have now been published in Times history.

It’s the theme of Tausig’s puzzle, though, that makes it special. Four entries in Thursday’s crossword can include either an “F” or an “M.” Both are correct; neither is wrong. For example, “Part of a house” can be either ROOF or ROOM. The long “revealer” answer, tying those select entries together and spanning 11 squares smack-dab in the middle of the puzzle, is GENDER FLUID.

This puzzle, with “M”s and “F”s that aren’t fixed, is a masterful blend of subject and structure. “It potentially really evokes what gender fluidity is, which is not moving back and forth between two poles, but actually not being committed to either pole, and potentially existing in many states at different times,” Tausig said.

nathaniel russell

Jupiter has 12 newly discovered moons!! I really relate to Valetudo, for some reason…

We’ve observed binary asteroids before, but it’s incredibly rare to see two that are the same size orbiting each other like this! Like all near-Earth asteroids, it’s believed these are remnants of our solar system’s formation. You can read more about these two here: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2018/07/rare-equal-mass-binary-asteroid-discovered-near-earth

Chemical Space Gardens

You know that colorful crystal garden you grew as a kid?

Yeah, we do that in space now. 

Chemical Gardens, a new investigation aboard the International Space Station takes a classic science experiment to space with the hope of improving our understanding of gravity’s impact on their structural formation.

Here on Earth, chemical gardens are most often used to teach students about things like chemical reactions.

Chemical gardens form when dissolvable metal salts are placed in an aqueous solution containing anions such as silicate, borate, phosphate, or carbonate.

Delivered to the space station aboard SpaceX’S CRS-15 cargo mission, the samples for this experiment will be processed by crew members and grown throughout Expedition 56 before returning to Earth.

Results from this investigation could provide a better understanding of cement science and improvements to biomaterial devices used for scaffolding, for use both in space and on Earth. 

Follow the growth of the chemical garden and the hundreds of other investigations constantly orbiting above you by following @ISS_Research on Twitter.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

i didnt know this until rn but apparently theres things called sundogs & moondogs that are basically the halo that sometimes appears around the sun & moon

this is a sundog

and this is a moondog

this is so cool & such cute names omg?????? i love space

Pluto compared with Australia

This might be my favourite iteration of this meme.

a gifset of planet facts because i rlly love space!!

//please dont remove caption!

NASA recently released new photos of an un-named planet creating a form of life; photos were taken years apart as a part of a long term study of a new “planet-x”

Sometimes it amazes me that the Juno spacecraft was originally designed without any cameras onboard. The JunoCam instrument has produced stunning imagery of Jupiter thus far and shows no signs of stopping soon. The latest wonder is this false-color, high-contrast animation showing the motion of Jupiter’s clouds swirling and flowing past one another. 

Now, this is not Jupiter as you would see it by eye. This animation is derived from two images taken 8 minutes and 41 seconds apart. In that time, Juno  covered a lot of distance, so the two images had to be mathematically re-projected so that they appeared to be taken from the same location. Then, by comparing relative positions of recognizable features in the two photos and applying some understanding of fluid mechanics, observers could calculate the probable flow between those two states. Although this is a coarse example, it’s the same kind of technique often used in fluid dynamical experiments when measuring how flows change between two images. (Image credit:  NASA/JPL/SwRI/MSSS/G. Eichstädt, source; via EuroPlanet; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

a “hypothesis”, or a “science headcanon”,

The planets!  Includes surface temperature, diameter, distance from sun, orbit period, and length of day.

someone has waited their entire career to use this headline

people act like Pluto was dealt a bad hand bc they thought it was a planet but later classified it as a dwarf but consider this: there are 4 other dwarf planets in the solar system that most people don’t even know the names of so Think Again before you think Pluto is underrepresented

a genious

on christmas eve i went to cvs and bought nail clippers and a bottle of wine. two whole items.

this is the receipt they gave me