phyz:

Your Mass is NOT from Higgs Boson

“The Higgs mechanism is meant to account for the mass of everything, right? Well no, only the fundamental particles, which means that electrons derive their mass entirely from the Higgs interaction but protons and neutrons, made of quarks, do not. In fact the quark masses are so small that they only make up about 1% of the mass of the proton (and a similar fraction of the neutron). The rest of the mass comes from the energy in the gluon field. Gluons are massless, but there is so much energy in the field that by E=mc^2 there is a significant amount of mass there. This is where most of your mass comes from and the mass of virtually everything around you.”

A bit technical, but still really interesting.

jtotheizzoe:

Imagine a Living Mars

Mars was likely not always the desolate, red-rocked planet that we see today. The Curiosity rover has found what appear to be water-smoothed pebbles, shaped by ancient rivers of flowing water. Curiosity and previous missions have also seen footprints of alluvial fans and river deltas, sure signs of a previously wet world.

Software engineer Kevin Gill has taken those observations to the next level with these simulations of a “living” Mars, covered with seas and lakes and teeming with vegetation and clouds. He used a survey of Martian terrain and elevation, plugged in a sea level to form oceans, and then painted the clouds and terrain as it might look or have looked.

It’s definitely more an exercise in imagination than in reality, as there’s no indication of past forests or marshy plains on the red planet, but it’s an informed imagination, a realization of a planet’s possible rich past or terraformed future.

Check out Kevin Gill on Flickr.

(via io9)

the-star-stuff:

How Stellar Stylists Turn Astronomical Data Into Amazing Space Images

Cassiopeia A is a 330-year-old ball of red-hot gases and space dust. But with the right makeup and some expert attention, this former star can still look positively radiant.

1. Capture raw images - Space telescopes spit out streams of 1s and 0s—representing light and darkness. Data visualizers begin with tiny black-and-white photos of the supernova remnant, each composed of hundreds of captures from various NASA observatories. Shown here is a raw black-and-white image taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a space telescope launched in 1999.

2. Blend the wavelengths - It may look seamless, but the portrait above is actually a composite of images taken in different wavelengths. (For instance, the infrared comes from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the optical is from the Hubble Space Telescope.) Visualizers then blend and smooth Cass’ problem areas. For the image from Chandra, regions with fewer photons get smeared into soft dust clouds, while more photon-rich parts appear sharper.

3. Colorize 

Visualizers assign hues to wavelengths that are invisible to the eye. This isn’t just aesthetics; each color tells a story. Generally, NASA uses the conventions of red = lower energy light, and blue = higher energy. In this image, (infra) red denotes warm carbon dust, yellow is starlight, green is multimillion-degree gas shot out of the dying star, and the blue band of X-rays is the edge of the shock wave of the original detonation. Behold: the stuff that stars are made of.

Images: Microsoft Research; Nasa

jtotheizzoe:

fuckyeahmolecularbiology:

Played By Humans, Scored By Nature

Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should. 

The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past. 

“We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.”

“This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.”

And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against.

So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising!

Crowdsourced science gaming hits the RNA world? Excuse me while I go ruin my colleagues productivity.

(Source: amolecularmatter)