Theidlerhour - Bricolage Brain

Battered Earth

A new study published by NASA researchers seems to confirm that 4-4.5 billion years ago almost the entire planet was showered in an intense bombardment of giant asteroids.

This period would’ve effected the whole planet, essentially melting the surface into molten rock multiple times over, boiling any water oceans into a steam-atmosphere and dramatically altering the geological landscape.

(Image credit: Simone Marchi/SwRI)

i cannot let the stress of right now over shadow the success i have faith in for my future.

Is it possible to have a spacesuit that is skin tight? My logic on this is that space wants to separate your bodies atoms but can the pressure be neutralized by having a tight enough skin suit? Am I even making sense?

Meet Dava Newman:

Now NASA’s Deputy Administrator (second-in-command). She’s spent years at MIT developing what’s known as the “BioSuit” - basically a skintight spacesuit that would use mechanical counter-pressure to apply about a third of an atmosphere on the body, enabling exploration with full range of motion, minimizing the energy spent fighting your own bubble-boy-of-a-suit.

There were a couple of problems remaining when she left to work for NASA:

The design so far still includes a pressurized helmet that has a seal issue with the rest of the suit. Also certain parts of the suit (the hands as you can see above) are difficult to get quite right.

The second problem is going to be returned to in a few years. The last I heard the research group was going to let material science develop carbon nanotubes and graphene a bit more and then try using those two materials somehow in the design.

It’s a super promising design and I hope they get it down pat! As is, it stands to benefit the medical community as well as to open astronaut qualifications to people shorter than 5′5″ (or somewhere around there) - below which apparently they can’t even apply to be an astronaut due to the spacesuits not being made small enough.

(Image credit: Professor Dava Newman: Inventor, Science Engineering; Guillermo Trotti, A.I.A., Trotti and Associates, Inc. (Cambridge, MA): Design; Dainese (Vincenca, Italy): Fabrication; Douglas Sonders: Photography)

The pride

When your little sister can reiterate the jist of Millikan, Rutherford, and Daltons models of the atom.

“And then there was this oil, and these charged plates, and he shot xrays at it, and the drops floated…. ”

“And then there was this gold foil, real gold, and they shot it, and some of the particles shot back, and everyone was like, whoa….DENSELY PACKED NUCLEUS”

Shooting in Midtown, Manhattan, getting soaked in the pouring rain. This kind of mood is something I’ve been trying to capture for a long time now, I spent about an hour out in the water and shot frames until my camera died.

Photography by Dave Krugman, @dave.krugman on Instagram.

We can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (via shrinemaidens)

We’re Already Halfway To Climate Change’s “Dangerous Limit”

Scientists say that warming of 2˚C is about all we can handle before we hit “dangerous” levels of climate change, a threshold of global temperature change that would bring enough droughts, food insecurity, rising sea levels, and species extinctions to make human life very much not fun.

The UK’s Met Office just reported that we’re already halfway there. Earth’s average temp has gone up 1˚C. 

Tick, tock.

Read more at Motherboard.