Kryptos Is An Encrypted Sculpture By The American Artist, Jim Sanborn, That Is Located On The Grounds

The upper atmosphere of the Sun is dominated by plasma filled magnetic loops (coronal loops) whose temperature and pressure vary over a wide range. The appearance of coronal loops follows the emergence of magnetic flux, which is generated by dynamo processes inside the Sun. Emerging flux regions (EFRs) appear when magnetic flux bundles emerge from the solar interior through the photosphere and into the upper atmosphere (chromosphere and the corona). The characteristic feature of EFR is the Ω-shaped loops (created by the magnetic buoyancy/Parker instability), they appear as developing bipolar sunspots in magnetograms, and as arch filament systems in Hα. EFRs interact with pre-existing magnetic fields in the corona and produce small flares (plasma heating) and collimated plasma jets. The GIFs above show multiple energetic jets in three different wavelengths. The light has been colorized in red, green and blue, corresponding to three coronal temperature regimes ranging from ~0.8Mk to 2MK. 

Image Credit: SDO/U. Aberystwyth

Scientists Create A Potential High-Efficiency Wireless Power System

With this, the world is one step closer to Nikola Tesla’s dream of wireless electricity. http://futurism.com/scientists-creates-potential-high-efficiency-wireless-power-system/

Can we talk about this?

So there’s this physics journal that uses math and science to discuss the realities of fictional universes in a super legit, peer-reviewed manner?

And they did a thing on Frozen?

Combining research on the film?

With info on how water works and stuff?

Then applied math and chemistry (and other things in which I am not especially well versed) to reach this conclusion:

So.

Russia will send these robots to space in place of humans

The anthropomorphic bot is a collaboration between robotics lab Android Technics and TsNIIMash, a Russian institute for building machines, according to Sputnik International. Alexander Permyakov, Director-General of Android Technics, told the news agency that these robots will be able to “completely replace human” in certain circumstances.

Follow @the-future-now

Is the End of Daily Insulin Injections for Diabetes Sufferers in Sight?

A new study reportedly shows that boosting the immune system can safely restore insulin production for up to a year—which might make it possible for those who suffer with diabetes to not require daily injections. Notably, these are Phase 1 trials, which are designed to look at safety, not long term effectiveness. So much research is still needed.

Yet, if the technique proves viable and effective, this could change the lives of millions of people around the world. According to the Center for Diseases Control, in the United States alone, 29.1 million people (or 9.3% of the population) have diabetes. That’s one out of every 11 people. 371 million people worldwide have this condition.

To break down the research, those afflicted with Type 1 diabetes do not have enough T-regs or ‘peacekeeping’ cells, which is ultimately what causes the disease. Researchers from Yale and University of California have just showed that T-regs can be removed from the body, increased by 1,500 in a lab setting, and then placed back into the bloodstream as a way of potentially restoring the body’s insulin production back to normal.

Find out more at: http://futurism.com/links/end-daily-insulin-injections-diabetes-sufferers-sight/

Staring at the sun does make you go blind. The lens in your eye concentrates the sun’s rays, which burn a permanent blind spot into your retina- just like ants under a magnifying glass. This effect is amplified during a solar eclipse.

It’s called solar retinopathy.

Source

The amateur geneticist who surprised science (long read)

Kim Goodsell has two rare diseases. Doctors blamed coincidence, but was it? She taught herself genetics to find out, and discovered something remarkable

Kim Goodsell was running along a mountain trail when her left ankle began turning inward, unbidden. A few weeks later she started having trouble lifting her feet properly near the end of her runs, and her toes would scuff the ground. Her back started to ache, and then her joints too.

This was in 2002, and Kim, then 44 years old, was already an accomplished endurance athlete. She cycled, ran, climbed and skied through the Rockies for hours every day, and was a veteran of Ironman triathlons. She’d always been the strong one in her family. When she was four, she would let her teenage uncles stand on her stomach as a party trick. In high school, she was an accomplished gymnast and an ardent cyclist. By college, she was running the equivalent of a half marathon on most days. It wasn’t that she was much of a competitor, exactly – passing someone in a race felt more deflating than energising. Mostly Kim just wanted to be moving.

So when her limbs started glitching, she did what high-level athletes do, what she had always done: she pushed through. But in the summer of 2010, years of gradually worsening symptoms gave way to weeks of spectacular collapse. Kim was about to head to Lake Superior with her husband. They planned to camp, kayak, and disappear from the world for as long as they could catch enough fish to eat. But in the days before their scheduled departure, she could not grip a pen or a fork, much less a paddle. Instead of a lakeside tent, she found herself at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

Continue Reading.

(Fact Source) Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

Why science says having a younger sibling can be really good for you

Despite all the aggravation.

Anyone with a younger brother or sister knows it’s not always an easy ride (unless you happen to be very fortunate), but a new study suggests there could be real, tangible health benefits to having a younger sibling. Researchers have linked having a little brother or sister to a lower risk of obesity in a comparison of the body mass indexes (BMIs) of 697 children in the US.

The University of Michigan team found that the birth of a sibling between the ages of two and four was associated with a healthy BMI, while those without a sibling by the first grade (age six) were almost three times more likely to be obese at that age. Those are quite dramatic findings, but the researchers behind them aren’t entirely sure why such a link exists.

“This study is believed to be the first to track subsequent increases in BMI after a child becomes a big brother or sister,” said senior author Julie Lumeng. “Research suggests that having younger siblings - compared with having older or no siblings - is associated with a lower risk of being overweight. However, we have very little information about how the birth of a sibling may shape obesity risk during childhood.”

Jupiter’s North Pole Unlike Anything Encountered in Solar System

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has sent back the first-ever images of Jupiter’s north pole, taken during the spacecraft’s first flyby of the planet with its instruments switched on. The images show storm systems and weather activity unlike anything previously seen on any of our solar system’s gas-giant planets.

Juno successfully executed the first of 36 orbital flybys on Aug. 27 when the spacecraft came about 2,500 miles (4,200 kilometers) above Jupiter’s swirling clouds. The download of six megabytes of data collected during the six-hour transit, from above Jupiter’s north pole to below its south pole, took one-and-a-half days. While analysis of this first data collection is ongoing, some unique discoveries have already made themselves visible.

“First glimpse of Jupiter’s north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It’s bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to – this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We’re seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.”

One of the most notable findings of these first-ever pictures of Jupiter’s north and south poles is something that the JunoCam imager did not see.

“Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole,” said Bolton. “There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. The largest planet in our solar system is truly unique. We have 36 more flybys to study just how unique it really is.”

Along with JunoCam snapping pictures during the flyby, all eight of Juno’s science instruments were energized and collecting data. The Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JI-RAM), supplied by the Italian Space Agency, acquired some remarkable images of Jupiter at its north and south polar regions in infrared wavelengths.

“JIRAM is getting under Jupiter’s skin, giving us our first infrared close-ups of the planet,” said Alberto Adriani, JIRAM co-investigator from Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome. “These first infrared views of Jupiter’s north and south poles are revealing warm and hot spots that have never been seen before. And while we knew that the first ever infrared views of Jupiter’s south pole could reveal the planet’s southern aurora, we were amazed to see it for the first time. No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora. Now, with JIRAM, we see that it appears to be very bright and well structured. The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora’s morphology and dynamics.”

Among the more unique data sets collected by Juno during its first scientific sweep by Jupiter was that acquired by the mission’s Radio/Plasma Wave Experiment (Waves), which recorded ghostly- sounding transmissions emanating from above the planet. These radio emissions from Jupiter have been known about since the 1950s but had never been analyzed from such a close vantage point.

“Jupiter is talking to us in a way only gas-giant worlds can,” said Bill Kurth, co-investigator for the Waves instrument from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. “Waves detected the signature emissions of the energetic particles that generate the massive auroras which encircle Jupiter’s north pole. These emissions are the strongest in the solar system. Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons come from that are generating them.”

The Juno spacecraft launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida and arrived at Jupiter on July 4, 2016. JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.

IMAGE 1….As NASA’s Juno spacecraft closed in on Jupiter for its Aug. 27, 2016 pass, its view grew sharper and fine details in the north polar region became increasingly visible. The JunoCam instrument obtained this view on August 27, about two hours before closest approach, when the spacecraft was 120,000 miles (195,000 kilometers) away from the giant planet (i.e., for Jupiter’s center). Unlike the equatorial region’s familiar structure of belts and zones, the poles are mottled with rotating storms of various sizes, similar to giant versions of terrestrial hurricanes. Jupiter’s poles have not been seen from this perspective since the Pioneer 11 spacecraft flew by the planet in 1974.

IMAGE 2….Storm systems and weather activity unlike anything encountered in the solar system are on view in these color images of Jupiter’s north polar region from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Two versions of the image have been contrast-enhanced differently to bring out detail near the dark terminator and near the bright limb. The JunoCam instrument took the images to create this color view on August 27, when the spacecraft was about 48,000 miles (78,000 kilometers) above the polar cloud tops. A wavy boundary is visible halfway between the grayish region at left (closer to the pole and the nightside shadow) and the lighter-colored area on the right. The wavy appearance of the boundary represents a Rossby wave – a north-south meandering of a predominantly east-west flow in an atmospheric jet. This may be caused by a difference in temperature between air to the north and south of this boundary, as is often the case with such waves in Earth’s atmosphere. The polar region is filled with a variety of discrete atmospheric features. Some of these are ovals, but the larger and brighter features have a “pinwheel” shape reminiscent of the shape of terrestrial hurricanes. Tracking the motion and evolution of these features across multiple orbits will provide clues about the dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere. This image also provides the first example of cloud shadowing on Jupiter: near the top of the image, a high cloud feature is seen past the normal boundary between day and night, illuminated above the cloud deck below. While subtle color differences are visible in the image, some of these are likely the result of scattered light within the JunoCam optics. Work is ongoing to characterize these effects.

IMAGE 3….This image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft provides a never-before-seen perspective on Jupiter’s south pole. The JunoCam instrument acquired the view on August 27, 2016, when the spacecraft was about 58,700 miles (94,500 kilometers) above the polar region. At this point, the spacecraft was about an hour past its closest approach, and fine detail in the south polar region is clearly resolved. Unlike the equatorial region’s familiar structure of belts and zones, the poles are mottled by clockwise and counterclockwise rotating storms of various sizes, similar to giant versions of terrestrial hurricanes. The south pole has never been seen from this viewpoint, although the Cassini spacecraft was able to observe most of the polar region at highly oblique angles as it flew past Jupiter on its way to Saturn in 2000

IMAGE 4….This infrared image gives an unprecedented view of the southern aurora of Jupiter, as captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on August 27, 2016. The planet’s southern aurora can hardly be seen from Earth due to our home planet’s position in respect to Jupiter’s south pole. Juno’s unique polar orbit provides the first opportunity to observe this region of the gas-giant planet in detail. Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) camera acquired the view at wavelengths ranging from 3.3 to 3.6 microns – the wavelengths of light emitted by excited hydrogen ions in the polar regions. The view is a mosaic of three images taken just minutes apart from each other, about four hours after the perijove pass while the spacecraft was moving away from Jupiter.

IMAGE 5….This montage of 10 JunoCam images shows Jupiter growing and shrinking in apparent size before and after NASA’s Juno spacecraft made its closest approach on August 27, 2016, at 12:50 UTC. The images are spaced about 10 hours apart, one Jupiter day, so the Great Red Spot is always in roughly the same place. The small black spots visible on the planet in some of the images are shadows of the large Galilean moons. The images in the top row were taken during the inbound leg of the orbit, beginning on August 25 at 13:15 UTC when Juno was 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) away from Jupiter, and continuing to August 27 at 04:45 UTC when the spacecraft was 430,000 miles (700,000 kilometers) away. The images in the bottom row were obtained during the outbound leg of the orbit. They begin on August 28 at 00:45 UTC when Juno was 750,000 miles (920,000 kilometers) away and continue to August 29 at 16:45 UTC when the spacecraft was 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) away.

IMAGE 6….This image provides a close-up view of Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft on August 27, 2016. The JunoCam instrument captured this image with its red spectral filter when the spacecraft was about 23,600 miles (38,000 kilometers) above the cloud tops. The image covers an area from close to the south pole to 20 degrees south of the equator, centered on a longitude at about 140 degrees west. The transition between the banded structures near the equator and the more chaotic polar region (south of about 65 degrees south latitude) can be clearly seen. The smaller version at right of this image shows the same view with a latitude/longitude grid overlaid. This image has been processed to remove shading effects near the terminator – the dividing line between day and night – caused by Juno’s orbit.