Bear Down Wildcats

These images were taken between 3:50 p.m. and 8:45 p.m. EDT on July 16, showing the moon moving over the Pacific Ocean near North America. The North Pole is in the upper left corner of the image, reflecting the orbital tilt of Earth from the vantage point of the spacecraft.

“It is surprising how much brighter Earth is than the moon," said Adam Szabo, DSCOVR project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Our planet is a truly brilliant object in dark space compared to the lunar surface.”

ghostwhitehorse wrote:Re: Falcon 9

NAILED IT MOTHER FUCKERS!!!!!!

azgreg wrote:

ghostwhitehorse wrote:Re: Falcon 9

NAILED IT MOTHER FUCKERS!!!!!!

ASUHATER! wrote:Wow if they can repeat that result consistently and make a bunch of those rockets then that will cut a huge cost out of spaceflight

ASUHATER! wrote:In the world of spaceflight that is below dirt cheap.

84Cat wrote:

ASUHATER! wrote:Wow if they can repeat that result consistently and make a bunch of those rockets then that will cut a huge cost out of spaceflight

$16 million to build the rocket, only $200,000 for fuel.

ghostwhitehorse wrote:

ASUHATER! wrote:In the world of spaceflight that is below dirt cheap.

Daryl Zero wrote:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sea ... a68880fc60

This Genius Bucket Sucks Trash And Oil Right Out Of The Sea

Two Australian surfers have quit their jobs and come up with a brilliant solution to combat the millions of tons of trash in our oceans.
Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski's Seabin invention is an ocean-cleaning device so simple and effective, we're wondering why it took so long.
The water filtration system is much like what you'd find in a fish tank, but it has the potential to clean up an entire ocean:

ghostwhitehorse wrote:

Jefe wrote:

Daryl Zero wrote:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sea ... a68880fc60

This Genius Bucket Sucks Trash And Oil Right Out Of The Sea

Two Australian surfers have quit their jobs and come up with a brilliant solution to combat the millions of tons of trash in our oceans.
Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski's Seabin invention is an ocean-cleaning device so simple and effective, we're wondering why it took so long.
The water filtration system is much like what you'd find in a fish tank, but it has the potential to clean up an entire ocean:

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology announced Wednesday that they have found new evidence of a giant icy planet lurking in the darkness of our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto. They are calling it "Planet Nine."

Their paper, published in the Astronomical Journal, describes the planet as about five to 10 times as massive as the Earth. But the authors, astronomers Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin, have not observed the planet directly.

Instead, they have inferred its existence from the motion of recently discovered dwarf planets and other small objects in the outer solar system. Those smaller bodies have orbits that appear to be influenced by the gravity of a hidden planet – a "massive perturber." The astronomers suggest it might have been flung into deep space long ago by the gravitational force of Jupiter or Saturn.

wyo-cat wrote:If he killed Pluto, then why is it still there?

On January 11th, the New York Times reported that Mosul Dam, the largest such structure in Iraq, urgently requires maintenance to prevent its collapse, a disaster that could drown as many as five hundred thousand people downstream and leave a million homeless. Four days earlier, the energy minister of Zambia declared that Kariba Dam, which straddles the border between his country and Zimbabwe, holding back the world’s largest reservoir, was in “dire” condition.

Mosul Dam’s predicament is partly a result of the ongoing war; many maintenance workers have not returned there since August of 2014, when ISIS fighters briefly took control. (Iraqi and Kurdish forces soon regained it.) But the main issue is that, like many such dams, the project shouldn’t exist in the first place. Opened in 1986, it was built on unstable gypsum bedrock, requiring grout to be constantly injected into the foundation to prevent the dam’s collapse. That work has ceased. In 2006, long before ISIS began making headlines, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called Mosul Dam “the most dangerous dam in the world.”

Kariba’s collapse, like Mosul’s, would constitute an epochal event in the history of energy development—the dam industry’s Chernobyl. The ensuing torrent would be four times bigger than the Zambezi’s biggest recorded flood, in 1958, and would release enough water to knock over another major dam three hundred miles downstream, in Mozambique. At least three million people live in the flood’s path; most would die or lose their crops or possessions. About forty per cent of the electricity-generating capacity of twelve southern African nations would be eliminated.

Just over 100 years after he published his general theory of relativity, scientists have found what Albert Einstein predicted as part of the theory: gravitational waves.

"We have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which was created to do just what Reitze announced.

STEM cells are being used to regrow damaged knee cartilage in world-first Melbourne trials it is hoped will make many joint replacements and other surgery unnecessary.

Doctors have halted damage caused by degenerative conditions, and even reversed it, in one of the first studies to use stem cells to rebuild cartilage in humans.

AFTER six knee operations, Ollie Thursfield had to give up his beloved surfing. He could barely walk down the street.

One knee had deteriorated since he was 13 years old, thanks to a congenital deformity called osteochondritis dissecans.

Now, at 26, no cartilage remained and he was facing the prospect of having to have a knee replacement.

So desperate was this laid-back Anglesea health worker that he even contemplated handing over $7000 for an unproven stem cell treatment, with no scientific backing, at a cosmetic medicine clinic.

Instead, Melbourne Stem Cell Centre offered him the chance to join the world’s first controlled research trials in humans to assess the impact of stem cells in the management of osteoarthritis.

Six months later, MRI images showed cartilage regrowth, reversing some of the damage that hobbled him.

He is hoping for even greater improvements, and a return to the surf.

Professor Ian Frazer won the Australian of the Year award for the creation of the Gardasil vaccine, which gives immunity from about 75 percent of human papillomavirus (HPV) strains and now he's working on another vaccine to treat those who are already infected.

The vaccine's take-up is about 70-75 percent in Australia among young people but even in the U.S. where uptake is lower, Frazer told The Huffington Post Australia rates of the virus had declined.

"Abnormal pap smears for women under 30 are almost gone," Frazer said.

"It's not a highly infectious disease so if you can get half of the population vaccinated, there'll be a significant decline."

But Frazer didn't stop.

Gardasil was unable to help people already infected by HPV.

...In terms of how the DNA vaccine would work, Frazer said it came down the the fact that HPV wasn't passed from the body like any other virus.

"It’s quite simple really, most viruses kill the cells they infect, which is a nasty danger signal for the body so it turns on its defences pretty quickly to kill it and then kill the cells making more of the virus. This process saves us from flu and a whole range of different infections.

"Human papillomavirus doesn't kill the cells it infects -- rather it make them grow more. There's no danger signal to body -- all the body sees is tissue repairing itself."

The DNA vaccine takes a viral protein and alerts the body to the fact that it's dangerous. Once the vaccination is injected, the body now sees this particular protein as dangerous, and sets to work destroying the cells with this protein -- which is where the virus is.

The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout”—has been captured for the first time in the optical wavelength or visible light by NASA's planet-hunter, the Kepler space telescope.

PieceOfMeat wrote:For a second I thought it was actual video, until it occurred to me just how far away that star must be, and how we could never get such a close-up of it. Then I clicked the link and clicked through to the youtube video and read that yes, it's an animation based upon observations. Still, for that brief second I thought it might be the coolest thing I've ever seen too.

Astronomers have discovered a white dwarf star that has 99.9 percent pure oxygen atmosphere.

The presence of an ancient sun that is able to live for so long, causing its outermost layer to consist of only pure oxygen, was just a theory before the white dwarf star was discovered.

Small stars that have less than 10 times the mass of the sun become white dwarfs when they shed their outer layers, as the end of their lifespan nears. Ideally, due to high gravity, lighter elements of the star rise to the surface, while the heaviest elements descend to its dense core.

But in the case of this white dwarf star, also known as SDSS J124043.01+671034.68, the outer atmosphere is composed of more than 99.9 percent of pure oxygen. The expected surface helium and hydrogen are absent. It only has few traces of magnesium, neon, and silicon.

Astronomers cannot provide an exact answer to how it all happened but they speculated that the missing elements were stripped off the star's surface over time.