I just knew Star Wars was true!!

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0703/31twinstars/

Astronomers have found that planets are just as likely in twin or even triple star systems!!
Think of Luke Skywalker gazing up into the sky on Tatooine!!

And check out this photo of the moon Mimas aka The (Freaking) Death Star!

check these out

http://elle-woods.blogspot.com/

http://christavswonderwoman.wordpress.com/

invisibility

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/invisibility-cloak-15.jpg

Okay at the moment this technology is in it's infancy and for the above coat to work the observer has to be in a prearranged location and not move....however you can see where this technology may one day lead.....PREDATOR!!
This coat projects what is behind the wearer in front of them so that they partially appear to disappear. However, in theory there are alternatives ways which are far more effective at making something invisible.
If you can find a material which prevents light from scattering, you could coat whatever you wanted to make invisible in that material and it would seem to vanish into thin air!
Obviously this is incredibly complicated as the material would need to resonate at the same frequency as the light striking it to work.
I hope no one gives the CIA cloaking devices!!

Thought control

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6640000/newsid_6645400/6645429.stm?bw=bb&mp=rm

Computer games controlled via thought alone! How cool is that! You can bet the military and the porn industry are both keeping a close eye on that project. But just think of all the other uses such technology could be put to.....(I'll let you do that!)

only 50 years of fish left

The paragon of animals my ass! It's tempting to agree with Agent Smith (human beings are not a species, they are a virus: spreading from place to place, destroying/using everything, not finding a natural equilibrium, etc).
What are we like?

Voyager 1 passes 100 AU

Voyager 1, the nuclear powered spacecraft has just reached 100 AU (Astronomical Units = the distance from the Earth to the Sun or 93 million miles). That is a distance of around 9 thousand million miles from the Earth!
It is the outer most solar system, in a region called the heliosheath. If you imagine a vast bubble around the solar system, the heliosheath is the outer layer. The outmost layer of the bubble is the heliopause, the boundary to intersteller space.
The hubble space telescope has detected similar bubbles surronding other stars & solar systems.
So we have some frame of reference, easy as it is to imagine when looking at one of these hubble images, that you are looking at our solar system.
Both the Voyager probes will be travelling effortlessly through space for millions of years, possibly for thousands of millions of years, of even until the death of the universe.
They will, no doubt one day be the only evidence in the universe that human beings ever existed.
Voyager is an apt name for this amazing spacecraft and a reminder of what we can achievable through ambition, knowledge, resources, understanding and physics.

star dust

You, me, everyone who has ever lived and ever will live, your house, you car, your son, your daughter, even your dog are all made of star dust. So is this beautiful planet we call Earth. So are all the planets in the solar system and the sun itself.
Imagine the scene. some 6 thousand million years ago. A vast cloud of gas & dust is hit by the shockwave of a supernova (star death) and collapses under its own gravity, nuclear fusion is ignited and a star, in this case, our sun is born. Any material from the cloud that did not become our star, forms a disc around her and out of this disc the planets are born and we have our solar system.
So our entire solar system and everything in it was born out of a cloud of gas & dust. The trigger to the birth of our entire solar system was one of the most energetic things imaginable, a supernova.
Stars are factories. The very first stars were giant and made of the lightest element, hydrogen. These stars fused new elements inside their cores all through their life times, these new elements were subsequently blown into space when the star died in a supernova, helping to create the next generation of stars. Each generation of stars fused heavier and heavier (more & more complex) atoms together, until we finally reached things like oxygen & carbon.
All the complex elements in the universe, including the carbon we are made of, was made in the core and in the death throws of countless stars.

dark matter

Nasa's Chandra & Hubble space telescopes have contributed to the best evidence for the existence of dark matter by measuring the radiation given off by two distant, colliding galaxy clusters.
Dark matter is dark because it does not absorb or emit light, by its very nature it is impossible to observe directly, only its gravitational effects can be seen and it is these effects that have just been observed.
Without any dark matter surronding the clusters, the hot gas & dust between the galaxies and the galaxies themselves would quickly fly apart. Instead of this, observations showed the hot gas & dust was slowed by a drag force which must be from dark matter. Through it's effects, astronomers worked out that the dark matter itself was not slowing down because it only interacts graviationally.
For the first time, this seems to be direct evidence for the existence of dark matter in our universe.
Will our universe turn out to be, as thought by many scientists made up mainly of dark energy & dark matter, with only around 5% being baryonic (normal) matter?
Imagine that, if all of the stars in all of the galaxies in all of the galaxy clusters in all of the super galaxy clusters in all of the universe made up on 5% of everything in the universe.

inspired by the prgramme What makes us human?

It has long been a puzzle as to what caused the, in evolutionary terms, very rapid development of the cerebral cortex, which seems to have started 6 million years ago in our distant ancestors. (Human brains relative to the size of the body are huge, 3 times the size of a chimps brain). This rapid evolution of the brain allowed our ancestors and eventually ourselves to dominate our environment, through, amongst other things, the application of technology and it is also the reason why humans have an infinite ability to be creative/destructive.
Recently scientists have discovered a gene sequence which seems to play a significant role in giving humans their unique brain capacity. This sequence has gone through an amazing amount of evolution in the realitively short period of 6 million years. As an example, chickens & chimps (seperated by hundreds of millions of evolutionary years) share identical versions of this sequence, apart from two base pairs but humans & chimps have differences in 18 base pairs and we are only seperarated by six million years.
If this gene sequence is responsible for our very large brain capacity, how will we use the knowledge? Could this gene sequence and a few others like it be all that seperates us, all that it is that makes us human? Does this genetic inheritence manisfest itself in our potential to transcend our own biology? Am i talking utter bollocks?

thought experiment

I think this whole blog thing is gonna be like one big stream of consciousness like thought experiement. In which I may latch onto a few ideas (such as string/m-theory) to see if they could take us anywhere new in the quest for answers to those big questions (why am I here? What created the universe? etc) aswell as other questions science avoids answering (what is consciousness?) by saying that it is either simply a by-product of the brain or it is an illusion. Neither of these explanations are very satisfactory to me at all.

fate, destiny, god, whatever you wanna call it

I saw a bbc documentary about this guy called Abdul Haque. He was Afgani and had been one of the best commados against the Russian Army and had become sick and tired of his own people killing each other after the Russians left. To cut a long story short, he actually wanted peace in Afganistan. Eventaully he was in a position in which he had been a large number of Al-queda generals willing to defect to him, which would have possibly prevented the situation the world finds itself in now, he waited for the 'go' from the americans, but never got it. He was later tracked down and assassinated. Perhaps only because the Amerians wanted to use their newly developed technologies in Afganistan.
Anyway, the point here is that Abdual Haque could have been used. But he wasn't. You could say that destiny, fate, god or whatever had put him in that place at that time so that we didn't have to end up in the situation we are now faced with globally.
We didn't see the possible soluation. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't one present.
Can we not learn a great deal about such examples?

The power of thought...........

We used to think of the human brain as changable & malluable up to a certain age but after this age was reached, it was assumed this flexibility in the brain was lost. Now, scientists are starting to see that adult brains are also changeable & malluable. This could have profound consequences, such as people breaking free from things that they have felt trapped by in the past, possibly people breaking free of addictions to emotions and addictions to other drugs.
When you are thinking about something new and novel, you are building new neural pathways in your brain (over time), if these new & novel ideas are thought of extensively, then connections between the neurons in the pathways will become stronger and stronger.
These new & novel thoughts (such as repeating to yourself over & over again ''I'm going to have a good day and be a positive influence on other people today'') will create neural pathways that become used instead of the older ones (such as ''Man, I don't want to go to work today, it's going to be stressful and unenjoyable''), if a neural network isn't used it will shrivel up.
Because in science nothing is experienced directly, something always has to be perceived, filtering through assumptions, beliefs systems, past experience until it comes together to form an individuals reality: because of this, changing the way you think, builds novel neural pathways, which in turn, gives another route for the perception of reality to travel through, resulting in a new reality for the individual. All by the power of thought.

I wonder............

I wonder if through this blogging buisness if I could ever change my own reality and get a book published?