Category Archives: Uncategorized

A Scientific Look at the Term Spirit

Posted on December 28, 2013 by PlatoHagel

The English word spirit (from Latin spiritus “breath”) has many differing meanings and connotations, most of them relating to a non-corporeal substance contrasted with the material body. The word spirit is often used metaphysically to refer to the consciousness or … Continue reading →

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LHC and Open Access

Posted on December 25, 2013 by PlatoHagel

The CMS experiment at the LHC has released a portion of its data to the public for use in education and outreach. Explore this page to find out more about the data and how to analyse it yourself. LHC data … Continue reading →

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Entanglement and the Geometry of Spacetime

Posted on December 24, 2013 by PlatoHagel

Theorists have forged a connection between wormholes in spacetime (above) and a quantum phenomenon called entanglement. But how big an insight is this? It depends on whom you ask. Susskind and Maldacena note that in both papers, the original quantum … Continue reading →

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The Neutrino Sky

Posted on December 23, 2013 by PlatoHagel

A neutrino sky map based on data taken with 40 and 59 strings in the IceCube detector. Image credit: Juan Aguilar/IceCube. Astrophysical neutrinos are produced in the interactions of cosmic rays with an ambient medium of gas (protons) and photons of … Continue reading →

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Weber Bars Ring True?

Posted on December 21, 2013 by PlatoHagel

Gravitational Radiation Gravitational waves have a polarization pattern that causes objects to expand in one direction, while contracting in the perpendicular direction. That is, they have spin two. This is because gravity waves are fluctuations in the tensorial metric of … Continue reading →

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Gaia in Space

Posted on December 19, 2013 by PlatoHagel

Soyuz VS06 with Gaia space observatory blasts off from Europe’s Spaceport ESA PR 44-2013: ESA’s Gaia mission blasted off this morning on a Soyuz rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on its exciting mission to study a billion … Continue reading →

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Van Ellen Belt: Decade Age Old Mystery

Posted on December 19, 2013 by PlatoHagel

Schematic illustration of local electron acceleration by chorus The top panel shows electron fluxes before (left) and after (right) a geomagnetic storm. The injection of low-energy plasma sheet electrons into the inner magnetosphere (1) causes chorus wave excitation in the … Continue reading →

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Jet Creation

Posted on December 18, 2013 by PlatoHagel

Dialogos of Eide

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Wavelength Views of the Sun

Posted on December 18, 2013 by PlatoHagel

This movie, created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., shows how features of the sun can appear dramatically different when viewed in different wavelengths. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Telescopes … Continue reading →

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Symmetry Breaking and the Crab Nebula

Posted on December 13, 2013 by PlatoHagel

The connection between superfluidity and symmetry breaking has had a glorious history. It has left us a rich legacy of fertile ideas, that seems far from exhaustion. PG 60 Superfluidity and Symmetry Breaking You know while there have been processes … Continue reading →

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