The coldest place in our solar system is not Pluto, it’s Triton, one of Neptune’s moons.
Leontina Albina of San Antonio,Chile, gave birth to her 55th child in 1981, making her the world’s most prolific mother. I did not make this up, but verified it with Guinness.
The oldest known goldfish was 41 years old.
The first Bryan Baptist Church in Savannah lays claim to being the oldest African-American church in the United States. It was established in 1788, and services are still held.
The hottest temperature ever recorded was 136 degrees (Fahrenheit) in Libya on Sept. 13, 1922. The coldest temperature of -128 degrees was recorded in Antarctica on July 21, 1983.
US electric carmaker Tesla Motors has unveiled batteries that can power homes and businesses as it attempts to expand beyond its vehicle business.
Chief executive Elon Musk announced the firm would build batteries that store solar energy and serve as a back-up system for consumers during blackouts.
The device would allow consumers to get off a power grid or bring energy to remote areas that are not on a grid.
Tesla plans to start shipping the units to installers in the US by this summer.
In a highly anticipated event near Los Angeles, Mr Musk said the move could help change the “entire energy infrastructure of the world”.
“Tesla Energy is a critical step in this mission to enable zero emission power generation,” the company said in a statement.
The rechargeable lithium-ion battery unit would be built using the same batteries Tesla produces for its electric vehicles, analysts said.
The system is called Powerwall, and Tesla will sell the 7kWh unit for $3,000 (£1,954), while the 10kWh unit will retail for $3,500 (£2,275) to installers.
Energy comparison firm USwitch estimates that one kWh can power two days of work on a laptop, a full washing machine cycle or be used to boil a kettle 10 times.
Mr Musk said the company would partner with SolarCity to install the home batteries, but there would be more companies announced.
Mr Musk is SolarCity’s chairman and largest shareholder.
New research from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals the existence of a population of black holes that is consuming extremely large amounts of material, possibly allowing the black holes in these quasars to grow at an extraordinarily rapid rate.
Astronomers have studied 51 quasars with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and found they may represent an unusual population of black holes that consume excessive amounts of matter, as described in our latest press release. Quasars are objects that have supermassive black holes that also shine very brightly in different types of light. By examining the X-ray properties with Chandra, and combining them with data from ultraviolet and visible light observations, scientists are trying to determine exactly how these large black holes grow so quickly in the early Universe.
The quasars in this study – including the three shown as Chandra images in the bottom of the graphic – are located between about 5 billion and 11.5 billion light years from Earth. These quasars were selected because they had unusually weak emission from certain atoms, especially carbon, at ultraviolet wavelengths. Also, about 65% of the quasars in this new study were found to be much fainter in X-rays, by about 40 times on average, than typical quasars.
The weak ultraviolet atomic emission and X-ray fluxes from these objects could be an important clue to the question of how a supermassive black hole pulls in matter. Computer simulations show that, at low inflow rates, matter swirls toward the black hole in a thin disk. However, if the rate of inflow is high, the disk can puff up dramatically into a torus or donut that surrounds the inner part of the disk.
This is shown in the artist’s illustration in the top part of the main graphic. X-rays, produced in the white region very near to the black hole, are substantially blocked by the thick, donut-shaped part of the disk, making the quasar unusually faint in X-rays. The X-rays are also prevented from striking the particles that are being blown away from the outer parts of the disk in a wind. This results in fainter ultraviolet emission from elements like carbon.
The important implication is that these “thick-disk” quasars may harbor black holes growing at an extraordinarily rapid rate. The current study and previous ones by different teams suggest that such quasars might have been more common in the early Universe, only about a billion years after the Big Bang. Such rapid growth might also explain the existence of huge black holes at even earlier times.
A paper describing these results appears in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. The authors are Bin Luo (Penn State University), Niel Brandt (Penn State), Patrick Hall (York University), Jianfeng Wu (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Scott Anderson (University of Washington), Gordon Garmire (Penn State), Robert Gibson (University of Washington), Richard Plotkin (University of Michigan), Gordon Richards (Drexel University), Don Schneider (Penn State), Ohad Shemmer (University of North Texas), and Yue Shen (Carnegie Observatories).
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra’s science and flight operations.
An newly published study form MIT reveals how bombardier beetles superheat liquid and expel it in an intense, pulsating jet as a defensive mechanism.
Bombardier beetles, which exist on every continent except Antarctica, have a pretty easy life. Virtually no other animals prey on them, because of one particularly effective defense mechanism: When disturbed or attacked, the beetles produce an internal chemical explosion in their abdomen and then expel a jet of boiling, irritating liquid toward their attackers.
Researchers had been baffled by the half-inch beetles’ ability to produce this noxious spray while avoiding any physical damage. But now that conundrum has been solved, thanks to research by a team at MIT, the University of Arizona, and Brookhaven National Laboratory. The findings are published this week in the journal Science by MIT graduate student Eric Arndt, professor of materials science and engineering Christine Ortiz, Wah-Keat Lee of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Wendy Moore of the University of Arizona.
“Their defensive mechanism is highly effective,” Arndt says, making bombardier beetles “invulnerable to most vertebrates, and invertebrates” — except for a few very specialized predators that have developed countermeasures against the noxious spray.
The liquid these beetles eject is called benzoquinone, and is actually a fairly common defensive agent among insects, Arndt says. But bombardier beetles are unique in their ability to superheat the liquid and expel it in an intense, pulsating jet.
The key is that they synthesize the chemical at the instant of use, mixing two chemical precursors in a protective chamber in their hindquarters. As the materials combine to form the irritant, they also give off intense heat that brings the liquid almost to the boiling point — and, in the process, generates the pressure needed to expel it in a jet.
Learn how bombardier beetles detonate small explosions in their bodies to produce a scalding defensive spray. Video: Melanie Gonick/MIT
Seeing inside a living beetle
“For decades, the complex mechanism of how the bombardier beetle achieves spray pulsation as a chemical defense has not been understood, because only external observations were used previously,” Ortiz says. In the current study, the researchers used high-speed synchrotron X-ray imaging to “see” inside the abdomens of living bombardier beetles during explosions. They used a facility at Argonne National Laboratory to carry out the experiments and produce detailed images that revealed, for the first time, how the process works, with a camera recording the action at a rate of 2,000 frames per second.
The X-ray images of the explosion reveal the dynamics of vapor inside the beetles’ abdomens. They show that spray pulsation is controlled by the passageway between two internal chambers; two structures control this process: a flexible membrane and a valve.
The opening and closing of this passageway between a chamber holding the precursor liquid and an explosion chamber seems to take place passively; an increase in pressure during the explosion expands the membrane, closing the valve. Then, after the pressure is released when the liquid is ejected, the membrane relaxes back to its original state and the passage reopens, allowing the next pulse to form. This all takes place so rapidly — not to mention inside the insect — that the process had never been directly observed.
The explosive mechanism used by the bombardier beetle generates a spray that is not only much hotter than that emitted by other insects that use the same chemical irritant, but also propels the jet five times faster. Both the speed and the heat serve to make the spray even more effective against potential predators, Arndt says.
The pulsing nature of the spray may help protect the structure of the beetle’s reaction chamber, Arndt says, allowing time for the chamber walls to cool a bit before the next pulse.
Understanding the beetles’ ability to survive these intense internal explosions may help in designing blast-protection systems; this study shows how the sophisticated and specialized biological design of the system works to simultaneously achieve defensive and protective functions, Ortiz says. The reaction chamber, for example, possesses a rigid, reinforcing structure to minimize stretching and sustain temperature increases during an explosion, while other components allow for controlled, reversible stretching and movement to control the jet of fluid. The dynamics of the spray generation might also provide information useful in the design of propulsion systems, the researchers say.
R. Jeffrey Dean, a professor of biology at Cleveland State University who studies the defense mechanisms of the bombardier beetle, says the new work is a “wonderful confirmation of the qualitative passive ‘pulse jet’ model” first proposed by his team. “Although the findings are not unexpected, I’m amazed at the progressive advances in techniques,” he adds.
This research was supported by the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense through the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation.
The typical American family has 2-3 cars that each log in 15,000 miles per annum.
Each of the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket motors burned 5 tons (5,080 kilograms) of propellant per second, a total of 1.1 million pounds (500,000 kilograms) in 120 seconds. The speed of the gases exiting the nozzle was more than 6,000 miles (9,656 kilometers) per hour, about five times the speed of sound or three times the speed of a high-powered rifle bullet. The plume of flame ranged up to 500 feet (152 meters) long.
Every 45 seconds, a house catches fire in the United States.
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