There are over 3,700 planets in our galaxy. Many of them orbit stars outside our solar system, these are known as exoplanets. Spend a summer weekend barbecuing it up on any of these alien worlds.
(WARNING: Don’t try any of this on Earth—except the last one.)
1. Lava World
Janssen aka 55 Cancri e
Hang your steak on a fishing pole and dangle your meat over the boiling pools of lava on this possible magma world. Try two to three minutes on each side to get an ashy feast of deliciousness.
2. Hot Jupiter
Dimidium aka 51 Pegasi b
Set your grill to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius) or hop onto the first exoplanet discovered and get a perfect char on your hot dogs. By the time your dogs are done, it’ll be New Year’s Eve, because a year on this planet is only four days long.
3. Super Earth
HD 40307 g
Super air fry your duck on this Super Earth, as you skydive in the intense gravity of a planet twice as massive as Earth. Why are you air frying a duck? We don’t know. Why are you skydiving on an exoplanet? We’re not judging.
4. Lightning Neptune
HAT-P-11b
I’ve got steaks, they’re multiplying/and I’m looooosing control. Cause the power this planet is supplying/is electrifying!
Sear your tuna to perfection in the lightning strikes that could flash across the stormy skies of this Neptune-like planet named HAT-P-11b.
5. Red Earth
Kepler-186f
Tired of all that meat? Try a multi-colored salad with the vibrant plants that could grow under the red sun of this Earth-sized planet. But it could also be a lifeless rock, so BYOB (bring your own barbecue).
6. Inferno World
Kepler-70b
Don’t take too long to prep your vegetables for the grill! The hottest planet on record will flash-incinerate your veggies in seconds!
7. Egg-shaped
WASP-12b
Picture this: You are pressure cooking your chicken on a hot gas giant in the shape of an egg. And you’re under pressure to cook fast, because this gas giant is being pulled apart by its nearby star.
8. Two suns
Kepler-16b
Evenly cook your ribs in a dual convection oven under the dual stars of this “Tatooine.” Kick back and watch your two shadows grow in the fading light of a double sunset.
9. Takeout
Venus
Order in for a staycation in our own solar system. The smell of rotten eggs rising from the clouds of sulfuric acid and choking carbon dioxide will put you off cooking, so get that meal to go.
10. Take a Breath
Earth
Sometimes the best vacations are the ones you take at home. Flip your burgers on the only planet where you can breathe the atmosphere.
Grill us on Twitter and tell us how bad our jokes are.
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This adorable little robot is designed to make sure its photosynthesising passenger is well taken care of. It moves towards brighter light if it needs, or hides in the shade to keep cool. When in the light, it rotates to make sure the plant gets plenty of light. It even likes to play with humans.
Oh, and apparently, it gets antsy when it’s thirsty.
The robot is actually an art project called “Sharing Human Technology with Plants” by a roboticist named Sun Tianqi. It’s made from a modified version of a Vincross HEXA robot, and in his own words, it’s purpose is “to explore the relationship between living beings and robots.”
It never fails. Be sure to check out our protocols page, which allows you to check off completed steps and even includes timers for wait steps! www.biolegend.com/technical_protocols
The Crab Pulsar (PSR B0531+21) is a relatively young neutron star. The star is the central star in the Crab Nebula, a remnant of the supernova SN 1054, which was widely observed on Earth in the year 1054. Discovered in 1968, the pulsar was the first to be connected with a supernova remnant.
The Crab Pulsar is one of very few pulsars to be identified optically. The optical pulsar is roughly 20 kilometres (12 mi) in diameter and the pulsar “beams” rotate once every 33 milliseconds, or 30 times each second.
The outflowing relativistic wind from the neutron star generates synchrotron emission, which produces the bulk of the emission from the nebula, seen from radio wavesthrough to gamma rays. The most dynamic feature in the inner part of the nebula is the point where the pulsar’s equatorial wind slams into the surrounding nebula, forming a termination shock.
The shape and position of this feature shifts rapidly, with the equatorial wind appearing as a series of wisp-like features that steepen, brighten, then fade as they move away from the pulsar into the main body of the nebula. The period of the pulsar’s rotation is slowing by 38 nanoseconds per day due to the large amounts of energy carried away in the pulsar wind.
The Crab Nebula is often used as a calibration source in X-ray astronomy. It is very bright in X-rays and the flux density and spectrum are known to be constant, with the exception of the pulsar itself.
Description: Transmission electron micrograph of a portion of a type II alveolar cell from an aged guinea pig showing unusual protein within the RER.
Authors: Marian Miller and Brooks Adams
Licensing: Public Domain: This image is in the public domain and thus free of any copyright restrictions. However, as is the norm in scientific publishing and as a matter of courtesy, any user should credit the content provider for any public or private use of this image whenever possible.
There are many paths to a career at NASA. Here are 10 amazing people on the frontlines of deep space exploration.
1—The Pub Master
“I was running a pub in the North of England after dropping out of college, and as fate would have it, I met a lovely American physics lecturer Dr. Jim Gotaas,” said Abi Rymer (shown above in the bottom right of the group photo). Abi works on the Europa Clipper mission.
“I was sold on a course he ran on Observational Astronomy and Instrumentation at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, Lancashire and I went from there to join the second year of the Physics and Astronomy at Royal Holloway, part of London University. I loved theoretical physics but never imagined I was talented enough to do a PhD. When I graduated, I was shocked to be top of the year.”
2—The Orbit Artist
“Within seven months of being at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” says Brent Buffington, a mission design manager, “I figured out we could modify the Cassini Prime Mission trajectory to fly very close to the moon Tethys—a moon that didn’t have any close flybys in the original Prime Mission—and simultaneously lower a planned 621-mile (1,000-kilometer) targeted flyby of Hyperion down to 311 miles (500 kilometers). To be this young buck fresh out of grad school standing in front of a room full of seasoned engineers and scientists, trying to convince them that this was the right thing to do with a multi-billion dollar asset, and ultimately getting the trajectory modification approved was extremely rewarding.”
3—The Searcher
“Geochemical evidence suggests that between 4 and 2.5 billion years ago, there may have been an intermittent haze in the atmosphere of Earth similar to the haze in the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan,” says astrobiologist Giada Arney. “It’s a really alien phase of Earth’s history —our planet wouldn’t have been a pale blue dot, it would have been a pale orange dot. We thought about questions like: What would our planet look like if you were looking at it as an exoplanet? How you might infer biosignatures—the signs of life—from looking at such an alien planet?”
4—The Volcanologist
“I spent the summer after graduating from studying Mars’ remnant magnetic field in the Planetary Magnetospheres Lab at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,” says planetary geophysicist Lynnae Quick. “My advisor, Mario Acuña, showed me how to bring up Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) images of the Martian surface on my computer. This was the first time I’d ever laid eyes, firsthand, on images of another planet’s surface returned from a spacecraft. I remember just being in awe.
“My second favorite moment has to be pouring over mosaics of Europa and learning to identify and map chaos regions, impact craters and other surface units during my first summer at APL. Once again, I felt that there was a whole other alien world at my fingertips.”
5—The Pioneer
“A few months after NASA was formed I was asked if I knew anyone who would like to set up a program in space astronomy,” says Nancy Roman, a retired NASA astronomer. “I knew that taking on this responsibility would mean that I could no longer do research, but the challenge of formulating a program from scratch that I believed would influence astronomy for decades to come was too great to resist.”
6—The Modeler
“I took Planetary Surfaces with Bruce Murray (whom I later found out had been JPL’s fifth director) and did a presentation on Europa’s chaos terrains,” say Serina Diniega, an investigation scientist on the Europa Clipper mission. “I was fascinated to learn about the different models proposed for the formation of these enigmatic features and the way in which scientists tried to discriminate between the models while having very limited observational data. In this, I realized I’d found my application: modeling the evolution of planetary landforms.“
7—The Bassist
“I admire people who dedicate themselves 110 percent to what they do,” says Warren Kaye, a software engineer. “People like the recently deceased Stephen Hawking, who rose above his own physical limitations to develop new scientific theories, or Frank Zappa, who was able to produce something like 50 albums worth of music over a 20-year span.”
8—The (Space) Photographer
“I got to pick what the camera took pictures of in a given week, and then analyze those pictures from the standpoint of a geologist,” says Tanya Harrison, a planetary scientist. “There aren’t many people in the world who get paid to take pictures of Mars every day! Seeing the first images…It was almost surreal – not only are you picking what to take pictures of on Mars, you’re also typically the first person on Earth to see those pictures when they come back from Mars.”
9—The Scientist
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
At what point did you determine that you would become a scientist?
“Age 5.”
10 —The Extrovert
“Throughout my life, I’ve gone from being an extremely shy introvert to more of an outgoing extrovert,” says science writer Elizabeth Landau. “It’s been a gradual uphill climb. I used to be super shy. When I was really young, I felt like I didn’t know how to talk to other kids. I was amazed by how people fluidly spoke to each other without thinking too hard about it, without appearing to have any kind of embarrassment or reservation about what they were saying. I’ve definitely developed confidence over time—now I can very quickly and comfortably switch from talking about something like physics to personal matters, and be totally open to listening to others as well.”
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The most common cause of female infertility – polycystic ovary syndrome – may be caused by a hormonal imbalance before birth. The finding has led to a cure in mice, and a drug trial is set to begin in women later this year.
Polycystic ovary syndrome affects up to one in five women worldwide, three-quarters of whom struggle to fall pregnant. The condition is typically characterised by high levels of testosterone, ovarian cysts, irregular menstrual cycles, and problems regulating sugar, but the causes have long been a mystery. “It’s by far the most common hormonal condition affecting women of reproductive age but it hasn’t received a lot of attention,” says Robert Norman at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
A short note on how to interpret Fourier Series animations
When one searches for Fourier series animations online, these amazing gifs are what they stumble upon.
They are absolutely remarkable to look at. But what are the circles actually doing here?
Vector Addition
Your objective is to represent a square wave by combining many sine waves. As you know, the trajectory traced by a particle moving along a circle is a sinusoid:
This kind of looks like a square wave but we can do better by adding another harmonic.
We note that the position of the particle in the two harmonics can be represented as a vector that constantly changes with time like so:
And being vector quantities, instead of representing them separately, we can add them by the rules of vector addition and represent them a single entity i.e:
She has been my favorite for her hard work and motivation in life. In 1955, Annie began her career as a “human computer,” doing computations for researchers at the Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio. This involved analyzing problems and doing calculations by hand. Her earliest work involved running simulations for the newly planned Plum Brook Reactor Facility. When hired, she was one of only four African-American employees at the Lab. To understand her work better, you need to understand what a “human computer” actually means. This term was in use from the early 17th century and it really means just “the one who computes” (or calculates): a person performing mathematical calculations, before electronic computers became commercially available.
In the 1970s, Easley returned to school to earn her degree in mathematics from Cleveland State, doing much of her coursework while also working full time. She was a firm believer in education and in her mother’s advice “You can be anything you want to be, but you have to work at it”. This is the reason why I have chosen her for this post. Understanding that you can be anything if you put the effort in it is one of the most important aspect of succeeding in anything. Everything can be accomplished by working hard. Don’t think about giving me a genius examples and say that they were born exceptional and bla bla bla. The best example I can think of at the moment is Paul Erdős. He is considered a genius, but he did mathematics 19 hours per day. He had that 1% born capacity, but he had put every single second of his life into working and studying mathematics.
