This might be one of the biggest, if not the biggest spiderweb ever found. This huge web was found covering 180 meters of trees and bushes by the employees of park Lake Tawakoni in Texas. It’s not yet clear if this “work of art” has been made by a single or a colony of spiders. Also, nothing was said about the species of spider found at the location. Until further information is provided, here is the huge white web.
This amazing picture was taken on June 3, 1964 which is before I was born. The development of human society has been extraordinary these last few hundred years and to prove it where is one of many amazing pictures of great deeds.
Just before the time we were getting color TV we also had men’s walking in space.
The astronaut managed to walk in space with the help of a hand-held maneuvering oxygen-jet gun and an 8 meter tether. The gun held in his right hand ran out of fuel 3 minutes after he started the space walk making the astronaut use the tether to come back to the ship. The visor of his helmet is gold-plated to protect him from the unfiltered rays of the sun.
Hope you enjoy this fantastic picture.
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Though the stones were only erected in 2500 B.C. there are evidences of burials since 3000 B.C.
It seems like the local was used to only bury elements of one family being the first one at 3000 B.C. and then as the family gown up more and more bodies were then buried afterwards.
At the time bodies used to be cremated and methods of rating how old were those cremated bones just came to the access of researchers allowing the recent dating of the remains found at Stonehenge.
British archaeologists say it probably was a cemetery for the ruling dynasty responsible for erecting Stonehenge.
The answer to why researchers found up to 240 people remains is because Stonehenge staged as burial place for several generations of the same single elite family. The clue comes from the small number of burials in the earliest period and the larger numbers in the later centuries, as offspring would have multiplied said Andrew Chamberlain, Sheffield archaeologist.
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When tissues are damaged in plants they emit green-leaf volatiles which are attractive to social wasps. This happens because normally plants are damaged by parasites like caterpillars and wasps are their predator, so when a plant is damaged and emits those green leaf volatiles the parasitic wasps come to check it out to see if their meal is around.
Researchers have already found that orchids, which are known by the diversity of their pollination systems, also employ chemical deceit for the attraction of pollinators but this new way is just too awesome.
The orchid Epipactis helleborine is a typical wasp flower, exhibiting physiological and morphological adaptations for the attraction of pollinating social wasps. Despite the large nectar reward that these orchids offer, they’re overlooked by other potential pollinators because of their characteristics.
The wasps are attracted to those orchids because their flowers also emit green-leaf volatiles that trick the wasps to come to them, when the wasp reaches the designated orchids they just forget the motive why they are there and just take attention on the large nectar reward that the orchids offer.
This is the first example in which green-leaf volatiles have been implicated in chemical mimicry for the attraction of pollinating insects.
Font: Volume 18 Issue 10: May 19, 2008 of Biology online
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On April 28th of 2003 the spacecraft GALEX, which means Galaxy Evolution Explorer, was sent into space with the mission of observing galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history through an incorporated telescope.
This mission which was originally planned to last only 29 months was extended and is still active making in the beginning of next week 5 years that it travels the space sending information back to Earth.
GALEX’s ultraviolet observations are telling the scientists how galaxies, the building block of our Universe, evolve and change.
GALEX observations are providing data for NASA’s investigators to find out when and how the stars that we see today were formed and which chemical elements are the galaxies made off.
Thanks to GALEX, which has already observed more than 100 million galaxies, investigators will have the first comprehensive map of the Universe of galaxies under construction, helping them understand how galaxies like our own Milky Way were formed.
In effect, GALEX acts like a time machine through which humans see the universe as it was a few billion years after its birth because it observes places so far away that the light reaching GALEX, even traveling at 299.792.458 meters per second is still the same as billions of years before.
Has you might imagine both the ultraviolet images from our galaxy and other galaxies are something amazing. If there are limits on were our sights can reach right now, we can say that some are being defined by GALEX.
Here you’ll find a collection of the best and most important images sent by GALEX .
(Above) This image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows the galaxy NGC 300, located about seven million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. It is a classic spiral galaxy with open arms and vigorous star formation throughout.
Blue represents ultraviolet light captured by the telescope’s long-wavelength detector. Green shows ultraviolet light from the short-wavelength detector, and red shows red visible light from the Las Campanas Observatory, Chile.
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(Above) A close-up view of a star racing through space faster than a speeding bullet can be seen in this image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The star, called Mira (pronounced My-rah), is traveling at 130 kilometers per second, or 291,000 miles per hour. As it hurls along, it sheds material that will be recycled into new stars, planets and possibly even life.
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(Above) A close-up view of a star racing through space faster than a speeding bullet can be seen in this image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The star, called Mira (pronounced My-rah), is traveling at 130 kilometers per second, or 291,000 miles per hour. As it hurls along, it sheds material that will be recycled into new stars, planets and possibly even life.
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Image by cpurrin1 via Flickr
The 1st editions of Voyage of the Beagle have been recently made available in the site darwin-online.org.uk were you can find the complete work of Charles Darwin.
This site has the complete publications of Darwin, thousand of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalog ever published besides also having hundreds of supplementary works like biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.
Making the research made by Charles Darwin available online is a breakthrough since there are quite a few people that still don’t know or understand the theory of evolution, theory that has played a very important role in the world of sciences.
The jellyfish are marine invertebrates that can be found in any ocean of the world and even in some fresh waters.
Contrary to what people think the jelly is not a fish but an organism that belongs to the class Scyphozoa.
One special jelly is creating a lot of turbulence in the science world (the one in the photo) because it’s shaking some beliefs.
Through a massive analysis of the evolutionary biology of animals it has been suggested that this jellyfish might just be the direct progeny of the first animal on Earth making it the earliest member of the kingdom that includes insects, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals (including humans) and many more or all the ones that belong to the kingdom Animalia.
Normally experts were supposing the sponge to be the first true animal because it is the simplest known, lacking in distinct tissues and nervous system which are two of the jelly characteristics.
This discovery is a blow to the mindset that evolution automatically means increasing complexity, researchers say.
This completely new and amazing discovery to the world of science has been published by researchers in the 10 of April issue of Nature.
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These days it’s amazing to ear about finding plants that are thought to be extinct since most of the news just report cases of disappearing species.
This time at Cape York, far northern Australia, two thought to be extinct plants were found. The Rhaphidospora cavernarum which is a one and a half meters high herb thought to be lost since 1873 and the Teucrium ajugaceum last seen in 1891.
These findings were made thanks to a report produced from research by more than 100 academic and government experts.
Besides the finding of the thought to be extinct plants the report also stated that in Queensland every year more than 50 new plants are reported to appear and that there are more than 12,000 native plant species known to science in the state making Queensland a “well of life”.
The Tuatara Lizards from New Zealand are limited to two species which are the only surviving members of the Sphenodontidae family that flourished 200 million years ago.
This small lizard might measure up to 80 cm. from head to tail and besides resembling to lizards it’s also equally related to the snakes.
The Tuatara hibernate during winter and are nocturnal, terrestrial reptiles that often enjoy some exposition to Sun light in order to warm up their bodies.
Professor David Lambert and his team from the Allan Wilson Center for Molecular Ecology and Evolution recovered DNA sequences from Tuatara bones that are 8000 years old. From these bones researchers found out that although the Tuatara lizard has remained physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, it has the fastest changing DNA sequence.
Amazing how this “living dinosaur” still looks the same has ages ago and at the same time shows to have the fastest rate of evolution (DNA level).
Photo: Male Tuatara, wikipedia.
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On 2 of December, 1995 a spacecraft called SOHO (Solar & Heliospheric Observatory) was launched into space with the mission of studying the internal structure of the Sun, it’s extensive outer atmosphere and the origin of the solar wind which is a stream of ionized gas that blows continuously outward through the Solar System.
This project is the result of a combination of strength between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. ESA was responsible for the production of the space craft and its instruments while NASA was responsible for the launch and is now responsible for mission operations because NASA keeps track of the spacecraft through large radio dishes spread around the world which form NASA’s Deep Space Network.
Trough subtle waves that come from the interior of the Sun and that show up at its surface in the form of small ripples which are extremely difficult to be observed in detail from Earth, scientist expect to get more information about the core of the Sun. These details about the hidden core of the Sun will shed light to questions related to its formation, 4.6 billion years ago.
These subtle waves called g modes are thought to occur when churning gas bellow the solar surface sinks deeper into the star and collides with denser material originating ripples that propagate through the Sun’s interior up to its surface. When these waves reach the surface of the Sun they only measure a few meters and last some hours since it takes between two and seven hours to rise and fall just once.
Since 1995 that most of data retrieved by SOHO helped a lot of investigations and answered some questions about space.
One of the most important questions that this project expects to answer is the speed of the rotation of the Sun’s core which will reveal a lot of information about how our solar system was formed, because it represents the hub of rotation for the interstellar cloud that eventually formed the Sun and all the planets.
Now that you know the general information about this amazing machine that has been traveling the space for over 11 years and 5 months I’m sure that you’re going to like to check out the best pictures sent by SOHO.
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(Above: the Sun)An EIT 304Å image captures a pair of curving erupting prominences on 28 June 2000 — Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool dense plasma suspended in the Sun’s hot, thin corona. At times, they can erupt, escaping the Sun’s atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K. Every feature in the image traces magnetic field structure. The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures.
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(Above: the Sun)Blasting CME
This LASCO C2 image, taken 8 January 2002, shows a widely spreading coronal mass ejection (CME) as it blasts more than a billion tons of matter out into space at millions of kilometers per hour. The C2 image was turned 90 degrees so that the blast seems to be pointing down. An EIT 304 Angstrom image from a different day was enlarged and superimposed on the C2 image so that it filled the occulting disk for effect.
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(Above)SWAN observed a huge cloud of hydrogen, 70 times the size of the Sun, that surrounded Comet Hale-Bopp when it neared the Sun. Ultra violet light, charted by SWAN in 1997, revealed a cloud 100 million kilometres w ide and diminishing in intensity outwards (contour lines). The cloud was generat ed by a comet nucleus perhaps only about 40 kilometres in diameter. The yellow c ircle (lower right) gives the size of the Sun. Solar rays broke up water vapor r eleased from the comet by the Sun’s warmth. The resulting hydrogen atoms shone by ultraviolet light invisible from the Earth’s surface.
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(Above: the Sun)This composite image combines EIT images from three wavelengths (171Å, 195Å and 284Å) into one that reveals solar features unique to each wavelength. Since the EIT images come to us from the spacecraft in black and white, they are color coded for easy identification. For this image, the nearly simultaneous images from May 1998 were each given a color code (red, yellow and blue) and merged into one.
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