The natural universe is an amazing place. Our sun, which warms us at a distance of 96 million miles for billions of years. Black holes, with gravity fields so intense that light itself can not escape. And neutron stars… Continue reading ”Star” releases Staggering amount of energy…
I read a story today about some interesting observations being made using simple random number generators.
In a nutshell: some scientists developed a simple little box that is supposed to be a pure random number generator. This box design was used a couple of decades ago as a control system to see if people could somehow influence randomness with their minds. It was shown that ordinary people could apparently do so. A number of other scientists began coming up with more elaborate experiments to get to the bottom of this effect. Continue reading Psychic random numbers..
I was reading a news blurb in Astronomy magazine the other day about some new planets discovered around distant stars. Some of these planets are pretty weird.
An important couple of points need to be made first before I talk about the planets. I’ve got to mention that IANAAOAA (I am not an astrophysicist or an astronomer), so everything here is just a lay-persons perspective. From what I understand, scientists are not discovering these weird planets because they are the only type of planets around distant stars. They are finding them because the techniques they currently have will *only* find weird planets. Basically, the only methods they have at the moment to detect the existence of a planet boil down to detecting variations (“wobbles”) in the rotation of the star they are looking at. To make a star wobble enough to detect currently requires an extremely large planet (Jupiter sized or bigger) or a largish planet that is very close to the star. Future detection methods will hopefully allow detection of more typical planets
That said, some of the weird planets they are finding are really weird…
Continue reading New planets discovered…