hole
dr. dolittle | September 13, 2014Conservationists are trying hard to save the Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) from extinction. With less than 100 animals remaining, a captive breeding program was started at the University of California, Berkeley.
As you can imagine from the image below, the geographic range of this fish is smaller than other wild vertebrates. They are only found in the limestone caverns of the geothermal Devils Hole pool in Death Valley, Nevada. The pool is 3m wide, 20m long, 426 feet deep, and a very warm 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit. It is thought to have formed more than 500,000 years ago with the…
esiegel | February 6, 2013"According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape, nothing else can either. The result would be a black hole: a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape to infinity." -Stephen Hawking
You may have encountered objects that are the same size as one another, but have very different masses.
Image credit: Basic Science Supplies / © Accelerate Media.
This is because they're made out of different elements. The higher you go in the periodic table, the larger and more massive your individual atoms are, and so…
gregladen | April 24, 2012This is one of the hazards of being an archaeologist (it has happened to me a few times) but it is sad to see it occur with a private citizen.
The moral of the story? Don't be talking on your cell phone when instead, you should be scanning the terrain in front of you with Ground Penetrating Radar to locate cavities that are too close to the surface.
esiegel | May 16, 2008This has been all over my inbox since the press release came out yesterday; it's been on slashdot (thanks Brian), it's been at space.com, and there's a mediocre writeup on Universe Today. What's the big news? Black Holes don't destroy information after all!
What is this whole information thing, anyway? Take a look at all the normal stuff in the Universe: photons, protons, neutrons, and electrons, for example. They have lots of different properties each. They move around one another, they get bound and unbound from one another, they exert forces on one another, etc. They're aware of one…
esiegel | April 29, 2008No, not because it was too young to drink! Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics were looking at some X-ray objects, and discovered something really weird: a very bright X-ray source moving out of a galaxy at nearly 3,000 kilometers/second! This thing is a goner. If our Sun were moving at even one quarter of that speed, it would get thrown out of our galaxy.
Now, here's the kicker: this isn't just any old object getting tossed out of a galaxy, it is a huge black hole! How huge? About 300,000,000 times the mass of our Sun. You read that number right: 300,000,000…
esiegel | April 21, 2008What makes earthquakes? Although there are many causes, including volcanoes, the most common thing that causes them are tectonic motions, which also cause tsunamis. But as valuable as it is to understand other planets in our solar system and in other star systems, sometimes it's important to understand what's going on inside our own planet.
The crust of the Earth actually is made up of a number of plates, which rub against one another and move over time. Who's to blame? I fault the liquid hot magma.
So what happens is that these plates slip against each other in one of three ways, as shown…