A 7 year-old asks Neil deGrasse Tyson what would happen if two black holes collide.
It’s wonderful. You da man, Clayton.
Oh, and the answer will make your head spin in the all the best ways.
(by KaluzaPryme)
Exclusive for TIME from NASA:
The view of New York from the International Space Station evolved today, as the new World Trade tower became the tallest building in the city. See more here.
What You Lose When You Sign That Organ-Donor Card - WSJ
Ten Historic Female Scientists You Should Know
Read: Smithsonian Magazine
Tongue stud device uses iPod to drive wheelchair - Futurity.org
Saturn’s two biggest moons hang together in a stunning new photo from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Read: Space.com
The Only ‘iPad 3’ Story You Need To Read
The latest round of next-iPad speculation kicked off with a post on the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD site predicting an introduction in the first week in March. Follow-up coverage pointed to a March 7 date, and then a WSJ piece Tuesday reported that a new iPad would run on AT&T and Verizon’s 4G LTE networks.
That timing, however, should surprise nobody. Over the past few years, Apple has updated its mobile devices about once a year (aside from the iPhone 4S’s delayed arrival in October). The first iPad reached stores in April of 2010 and its successor shipped in March of 2011, so a March unveiling for an “iPad 3” would be right on schedule.
Last month, computer gamers working from home redesigned an enzyme. Last year, a gene-testing company used its customers to find mutations that increase or decrease the risk of Parkinson’s disease. Astronomers are drawing amateurs into searching for galaxies and signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The modern equivalent of the Victorian scientific vicar is an ordinary person who volunteers his or her time to solving a small piece of a big scientific puzzle.
Crowd-sourced science is not a recent invention. In the U.S., tens of thousands of people record the number and species of birds that they see during the Christmas season, a practice that dates back more than a century. What’s new is having amateurs contribute in highly technical areas.
Read: Matt Ridley on Crowd-Sourced Science | Mind & Matter - WSJ.com
Scientists believe that this is the animal from which everything else evolved. The first multicellular being that spawned every living being in this world through billions of mutations, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals to you. It’s an amazing discovery. Its name is Otavia antiqua, and it is the oldest animal ever discovered: 760 million years old. Scientists claim that it used to chill out in calm, nice, shallow waters, chewing on algae and bacteria through its pores and into its little tube body.
Read: You Come From This Thing: The Oldest Animal Ever Discovered - Gizmodo
“And to all the folks who are here, don’t let your robots wander off anywhere.”
“I can’t think of a cognitive process that’s not involved in StarCraft,” says Mark Blair, a cognitive scientist at Simon Fraser University. “It’s working memory. It’s decision making. It involves precise motor skills. Everything is important, and everything needs to work together.”
Internet addiction has same effect as cocaine on brains: study
This is your brain on the Internet: Messed up where there should be connections for making decisions and having normal emotions.
Results of a new study suggest people who cannot control, cut back or stop their use of the Internet have abnormal white matter structure in the brain similar to what is seen in cocaine and crystal-meth addicts.
According to the study’s authors, as the number of people logging onto cyberspace soars, “Internet addiction disorder” — which is poised to enter the official lexicon of psychiatric illnesses — “is becoming a serious mental-health issue around the world.”
The disorder, as described in the study published this week in the journal PLoS One, is defined as “problematic” or pathological computer use that can cause “marked distress” and interfere with school, work, family and social relationships.
For their study, led by Hao Lei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, researchers scanned the brains of 17 teens and young adults, aged 14 to 24, with Internet addiction and 16 healthy “controls” of similar age.
People were classified as suffering from Internet addiction disorder, or IAD, based on a questionnaire that included the following: Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet? Do you stay online longer than originally intended? Do you feel restless, moody, depressed or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use?
The Amazon rain forest is home to many large beetles, but none of them compares in length to the titan beetle, Titanus giganteus. This gargantuan insect has mandibles that can easily snap a pencil in half, and reportedly they can rip into human flesh, too.
10 of the largest insects in the world
Celebrate Stephen Hawking’s 70th Birthday with Errol Morris’ Film, A Brief History of Time
Today, January 8th, marks Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday. He’s the most famous theoretical physicist of all time, one of our greatest minds, subdued in a paralyzed body.
Celebrate his life and work with the complete film A Brief History of Time, directed by Errol Morris, music by Philip Glass.
(via Open Culture)
Capsule beds aimed at students, budget tourists in Hong Kong
