Tag: point of view
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Faster than light. In nothingness…
It has long been known that charged particles, such as electrons and protons, produce the electromagnetic equivalent of a sonic boom when their speeds exceed that of photons in the surrounding medium. This effect, known as Cherenkov emission, is responsible for the characteristic blue glow from water in a nuclear reactor, and is used to…
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Pluto. The lonely planet…
New Horizons. A historic fly-by. Near Pluto. (1) Pluto, the planet (yes, I still call him a “planet”, I am an astronomy-anarchist) furthest from the Sun. A small lonely planet. Cold and away from the Sun. But wait a minute. Why “lonely”? Why do we keep projecting our own point of view to the others?…
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Perception. Being inside. Being outside. A comet’s tail…
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission has sent back some amazing photos as it approaches comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet and prepares to land on its surface. But we have a question: Where’s the tail? Gerhard Schwehm, former manager of the Rosetta mission, tells Popular Science that the tail as we see it from Earth looks very…
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Gut, viruses, life itself…
Odds are, there’s a virus living inside your gut that has gone undetected by scientists for decades. A new study has found that more than half the world’s population is host to a newly described virus, named crAssphage, which infects one of the most common gut bacterial species, Bacteroides. This bacterium thought to be connected…
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