Stalking your ex on Facebook is creepy and bad
for you

post from Top stories on 21 September 2012 09:42:43 AM. © Top stories

New research from Dr. Tara Marshall at Brunel University has found that Facebook surveillance of ex-romantic partners may disrupt post-breakup recovery and personal growth.

That?s bad news, because earlier this year Veronika Lukacs found that almost 90% of people keep tabs on their exes using Facebook.

Subject:

Computer Science

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/stalking-your-ex-facebook-creepy-and-bad-you

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Keeping the Worldship Alive

post from Centauri Dreams on 21 September 2012 09:28:01 AM. © Centauri Dreams

One of the challenges of explaining why a starship project is worth doing even though its final goal may not be realized for a long time is in showing how this work can have an impact on improving things on Earth. Technological spinoffs have acquired a[...]

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Ancient relations found between language families

post from Top stories on 21 September 2012 09:26:38 AM. © Top stories

How do language families evolve over many thousands of years? How stable over time are structural features of languages? Researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen Levinson from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen introduced a new method using Bayesian phylogenetic approaches to analyse the evolution of structural features in more than 50 language families. Their paper 'Abstract profiles of structural stability point to universal tendencies, family-specific factors, and ancient connections between languages' was published online on September 20, 2012 in PLoS ONE.

Subject:

Brain & Behavior

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/ancient-relations-found-between-language-families

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Light squeezed on a quantum scale

post from Top stories on 21 September 2012 09:19:00 AM. © Top stories

An international team of physicists has pushed the boundaries on ultra-precise measurement by harnessing quantum light waves in a new way.

It is one thing to be able to measure spectacularly small distances using "squeezed" light, but it is now possible to do this even while the target is moving around.

An Australian-Japanese research collaboration made the breakthrough in an experiment conducted at the University of Tokyo, the results of which have been published in an article, "Quantum-enhanced optical phase tracking" in the prestigious journal, Science.

Subject:

Technology

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/light-squeezed-quantum-scale

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A butterfly in the Swan

post from Bad Astronomy on 21 September 2012 09:00:39 AM. © Bad Astronomy

I am constantly amazed and awed by the sheer beauty of planetary nebulae – the gorgeous structures created as stars die. Among the most astonishing of them is NGC 7026, a youngish nebula about 6000 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, the[...]

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complicated software and you, defense edition

post from weird thingsweird things | exploring science, technology, the strange and the unknown on 21 September 2012 07:14:19 AM. © weird thingsweird things | exploring science, technology, the strange and the unknown

Military planners in the U.S. are fretting about the success of the F-35 jets and for good reason since they’re slated to be the backbone of all military aviation over the next half century, so over the next 50 years, more than a trillion dollars will be spend building, testing, and maintaining a vast fleet [...]

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http://worldofweirdthings.com/2012/09/21/complicated-software-and-you-defense-edi
tion/

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Hubble and Einstein credited for the discovery of
ancient galaxies

post from Science and Technology Blog on 21 September 2012 06:45:00 AM. © Science and Technology Blog

For the first time, Scientists were able to observe a distant galaxy which was formed in the early days of the Universe, just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery was possible thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and the general relativity theory of Albert Einstein.

The oldest picture of the universe have been acquired by scientists using electromagnetic noise left from the Big Bang, a kind of diffuse halo that can not be associated with any star, galaxy or other astronomical object.
This occurs in less than 400,000 years after the Big Bang, a period that can be compared to a fraction of a second, according to the age of the universe (13.7 billion years). No star existed at that time, only the hydrogen atoms that were just created. It took another billion years to have another detailed image, but the landscape was already radically changed: the Universe was containing galaxies that included billions of stars.
What has happened in the meantime?
Astronomers find it difficult to answer, because they can not separate the cosmological background noise from the signals that come from the far corners of space. Wei Zheng from Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University in the U.S., and colleagues have formed an initial answer to this question, revealing a galaxy that formed approximately 500 million years after the Big Bang. They turned their attention to Albert Einstein's theory, according to which very massive objects have a gravitational field so strong that they manage to deflect the light rays passing near them. And sometimes, this deformation has the effect of enhancing the perceived image of an observer located on the other side of the field. Such a phenomenon is called "gravitational lens".
Scientists have used Hubble telescope to search for distant galaxies, hidden behind massive clusters of galaxies, which could serve as "magnifying glass".After analyzing 12 "clusters" of galaxies, they have discovered a distant galaxy, formed 500 million years after the Big Bang, according to the study published Wednesday in the Nature, a British journal.
Building huge terrestrial telescopes should lead to new discoveries like this, allowing scientists to explore new fields of the Universe.

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Let's use evolution to turn us green

We say we want to save the planet, but don't change our lifestyles to do so. Is evolution an overlooked option, ask Mark van Vugt and Vladas Griskevicius

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icle0Cmg21528820A0B20A0A0Elets0Euse0Eevolution0Eto0Eturn0Eus0Egreen0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fenvironment/story01.htm

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A 3D photo album of Endeavour at Edwards Air
Force Base

I drove up to Edwards Air Force Base today to see the shuttle carrier aircraft NASA 905 carry in the space shuttle Endeavour, which will be delivered to Los Angeles tomorrow. I'm not a great photographer but I do have a 3D camera; here's an album.

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http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/09202000-endeavour-anaglyphs
.html

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7000

According to my software, this blog post you are reading is the 7000th article I have published on the Bad Astronomy Blog.Wow.That’s a lot of words. It’s also a lot of astronomy, geekery, science, antiscience, web comics, puns, embiggenates,[...]

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