Author: Tyrone Jones

– 201106MaconComet main 0602

In a relevant display of  NASA’s fireball-observing network capabilities, a set of automatic robotic cameras caught a man-sized meteor as it blasted though Earth’s atmosphere causing a fireball spectacle. The event took place on May 20, when the 6-foot-wide (1.8-meter) space rock entered the atmosphere at about 66 miles (106 kilometers) above the city of […]

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– 201106robot juggling

You can add another thing to the list of robots do and 99.99% of humans can’t; this time, it’s all about juggling. Students from the Department of Control Engineering at Prague’s Czech Technical University have managed to create a robot that can juggle up to 5 balls, something that even most jugglers have a hard […]

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– 201105italian earthquake

Topping this week’s absurd news by far, this is one of the most preposterous things I’ve read in all my life. Seven seismologists are charged with manslaughter after they failed to predict the 2009 L’Aquila that made 300 victims. Earthquake prediction and other fairytales At the moment, and in the forseeable future, it is impossible […]

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– 201105barbie

Our perception of size and distances is basically a product of how the brain interprets different visual signals, like for example the size of an object on the retina or its movement across the visual field. Now, if you were shrinking to the size of a doll in your sleep, when you woke up, the […]

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– 201105monkey regret

Much like humans, monkeys too exhibit signs of regret, and they wonder themselves what might have been, according to a recent study published by researchers from Yale. The study, published in the Neuron journal, suggests that aside from regrets, monkeys often wonder about how different actions would lead to different outcomes; as researchers state, aside […]

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– 201105600 iss spacewalkers ap 110525

This Wednesday morning, Andrew Feustel and Mike Fincke floated out on a spectacular 6 hour long spacewalk outside the International Space Station – the third spacewalk since Endeavour launched into space for its last mission before retirement. “It’s great to be back outside. It’s the most beautiful planet in the universe,” said Fincke as he […]

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– 201105defect graphene

Graphene is probably the ‘substance of the century’, and it will probably be for us what plastics were in the 1900s. Now, a flower-like defect in the material that can occur during the fabrication process could have a significant effect on graphene’s already impressive mechanical, magnetic, and electrical properties. Amazing graphene Graphene is practically a […]

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– 201105electrons

There are still many things we still don’t understand about the electron; only recently, a team from the Imperial College London concluded that the electron is actually incredibly round, thus making the most accurate estimate of its shape. The experiments, which spanned more than a decade, suggest that the electron differs from being round by […]

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– 201105pyramids

Not one, not 2, or 3, 5, 10 – but 17 new pyramids were found by a new Egyptian satellite survey. A dozen and a half pyramids The survey also detected 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements, using infrared images to detect the underground buildings; the satellites were equipped with cameras that could pinpoint objects […]

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