In Bloom by Anna Schuleit
Slated for demolition, the Massachusetts Mental Health Center needed one final poignant goodbye before it faded from collective memory forever, so artist Schuleit decided to bring life to the hallways, offices, stairwells, and rooms that would soon be gone by “planting” 28,000 flowers on almost every square inch of floor in the doomed building. A reminder that life goes on, but we all contributed a small part.
(via: colossal)
10 Years of Planet Earth
Smile, Earth! 10 years ago on Mar. 1, the European Space Agency launched an 8 ton satellite called Envisat, armed with high-tech photographic weapontry, radar to see through clouds, as well as instruments to capture ocean color and cloud cover, see infrared and thermal spectrums, and even register surface topography. Envisat has since orbited the earth 50,000 times and captures some of the most gorgeous photos of this spinning ball of mud we lovingly refer to as home. Smile, Earth!
LOST in legos - love it!!!
Aaron recreated some LOST scenes for his sisters birthday card using Legos.
Students after we visited the astrophysics lecture on modeling gravity waves when galaxies collide at John Hopkins Engineering research facility.gpoy
Must visit. Not only geo nerdy but hot like magma…
“Leif the Lucky Bridge”, in southwest Iceland across the Alfagja rift valley, the boundary of the Eurasian and North American continental tectonic plates. This bridge makes it possible to walk between continents that thousands of years of geological separation have made, and was built as a symbol for the connection between Europe and North America. How geo-nerdy is that?!
I’ve never really gotten a clear answer as to the shape of Earth’s magnetosphere… The simple explanation is net direction in response to ‘force’ of solar wind but there has got to be more to it, no?
The geomagnetic field
Magnets are cool, and that’s a scientifically proven fact. I could make some joke about superconductors couldn’t I? Anyways, the fact is you’re currently clinging to the surface of a giant magnet, sure it’s kinda of glorified by having a nice and friendly covering, but the only reason for that covering and of course you is because we live on a magnet. However it’s not your standard iron bar magnet, instead the magnetic field is explained by something called the dynamo theory. This theory refers not to the solid iron core itself but to the molten iron surrounding this. This liquid iron is an electrically conductive fluid and is in a state of constant (albeit slow) movement due to convection and rotation. As many of you will know a moving current is what is responsible for a magnetic field and it makes no difference whether this in a wire or through a liquid.
So where would we be without the magnetic field? Well it’s thought that the geomagnetic field started up around 3.5 billion years ago, about a billion years after Earth’s formation and around about the same time we get any hint of life in the fossil record. Earth’s magnetic field is what protects us from harmful solar winds and stellar radiation, without it we’d be fried. It’s also the thing that allows us to see auroras. So be thankful for magnetism.
First discovered about a decade ago, the largest known cave crystals—single hunks of gypsum as much as 11 meters long, 1 meter thick, and weighing 55 tons—could have taken up to 1 million years to grow, a new study suggests. The cavern in the Mexican silver and lead mine where the crystals were found was filled with mineral-rich waters until 1975, when it was drained to provide miners with access to new ore veins. Lab tests indicate that the gypsum hunks crystallized at temperatures between 54°C and 58°C, researchers report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By immersing a hunk of gypsum in a sample of the cave’s waters and using a microscopic imaging technique that allowed the scientists to directly measure crystal growth, the team found that at 55°C, near the temperature at which the crystals would have grown most slowly, it would take around 990,000 years for a gypsum crystal 1 meter in diameter to form. At water temperatures of 56°C, the same crystal could have formed in about 500,000 years.
For a mom that advises her sons Lego robotics team and teaches high school physics - THIS JUST MADE MY DAY.
LEGO Large Hadron Collider by Sascha Mehlhase
This 1:50 scale LEGO LHC uses 9,500 different pieces, taking about 33 hours to complete in addition to the 48 hours Sascha spent creating the 3D model base. This baby black-hole maker also cost 2000 euros (about $2,585 USD) in parts to build. So now there’s even more reason to fear the accidental creation of a Hell-portal on earth ala Doom. Or at least a LEGO Hell-portal.
