Final preparations being carried out in the week before the VLT UT1 First Light. Following successful optical alignment tests, the 8.2-m primary mirror was removed from the first Unit Telescope (UT1). This image shows preparations to move it into the Mirror Maintenance Building (MMB) to be coated with a thin, highly reflective aluminium layer. The cell with the 8.2-m mirror has been detached from the lower part of the telescope tube. (Photo obtained on May 17, 1998).
Here’s something you don’t hear everyday – everything we perceive is just a best case probabilistic prediction by our brain, based on our past encounters and knowledge gained through other mediums. This might sound extremely counter intuitive because we have always imagined that our brain mostly gives us deterministic answers.
We’ll do a small experiment to showcase this logic. Take a look at the below image:
Nashville, Tenn. (WKRN) — If you saw the moon Saturday night, you know how bright it was!
Technically, it will be a full moon Sunday at 7:58 p.m. There is something else that is special about Sunday’s night sky.
There is a “conjunction” of the moon with Jupiter Sunday and Monday evenings just after sunset in the southeastern sky. Sunset is at 7:32 p.m.
Continue reading “Full moon tonight & conjunction with Jupiter” »
On April 25, 1849, German mathematician and mathematics educator Felix Klein was born. Klein is known for his work in group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and on the connections between geometry and group theory. His 1872 Erlangen Program, classifying geometries by their underlying symmetry groups, was a hugely influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the day. Klein also devised the Klein-bottle, a one-sided surface which, if traveled upon, could be followed back to the point of origin while flipping the traveler upside down.
A mathematician named Klein Thought the Möbius band was divine. Said he: “If you glue The edges of two, You’ll get a weird bottle like mine.” ( Leo Moser )
Felix Klein’s father was an old Prussian Protestant from Ennepetal in southern Westphalia. He was district administrator of the government’s main fund in Düsseldorf, while Klein’s mother came from industrial circles in Aachen. In the autumn of 1865 Felix Klein began studying mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Bonn. Klein studied in Bonn with Rudolf Lipschitz and Julius Plücker, whose assistant he became. After Plucker’s death Alfred Clebsch took over the publication of his unfinished work and transferred this work to the talented Klein received his doctorate in 1868 from Plücker with a topic from geometry applied to mechanics. In 1869 he went to Berlin University and listened to a lecture by Leopold Kronecker on square forms.[5] He took part in the mathematical seminars of Ernst Eduard Kummer and Karl Weierstrass, where he also met Sophus Lie, with whom he went to Paris for a study visit in 1870 and was a friend.
It’s said to be one of the most active volcanoes in the world.
Le Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean started spewing lava on Friday and continued into the weekend.
And there was a spectacular light show for those who ventured out.
BERLIN (AP) — The European Space Agency has released the first image taken by its Trace Gas Orbiter showing the ice-covered edge of a vast Martian crater.
Scientists combined three pictures of the Korolev Crater taken from an altitude of 400 kilometers (249 miles) on April 15.
Lead researcher Nicolas Thomas said Thursday the colors in the resulting image were also adjusted to best resemble those visible to the human eye.
Continue reading “European Space Agency releases 1st image from Mars orbiter” »
Want to see 1.7 billion stars in stunning detail? This 3D color map of our universe is the best ever. (via Seeker Universe)
Jeffrey Tibbetts prepped for implantation and scrubbed in, methodically sudsing up to his elbows, scraping the dirt from under his fingernails and scouring his hands with a rough brush to render his body sterile before donning a pair of beige latex surgical gloves.
Behind him, a twentysomething tea barista in a black baseball cap waited pensively, his left ring finger exposed from under a surgical drape, a tourniquet wrapped tightly around it. For months, an implanted magnet had been uncomfortably bulging out of the side of Zac Shannon’s finger. Tibbetts picked up a scalpel and began cutting, gently scraping away at the flesh until the incision was deep enough to expose the magnet. With the very steady hands of a practiced surgeon, he pulled out the tiny hunk of metal.
Tibbetts plopped another magnet into the finger, sutured it shut, and removed the tourniquet. The small wound began to gush blood.
