A New Home on Mars: NASA Langley’s Icy Concept for Living on the Red Planet

An artist’s rendering of the Mars Ice Home concept.
Credits: NASA/Clouds AO/SEArch

A New Home on Mars: NASA Langley’s Icy Concept for Living on the Red Planet: For researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center, the best building material for a new home on Mars may lie in an unexpected material: Ice.

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Search for Dark Matter in Gamma Rays

This view from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is the deepest and best-resolved portrait of the gamma-ray sky to date. The image shows how the sky appears at energies more than 150 million times greater than that of visible light. Among the signatures of bright pulsars and active galaxies is something familiar — a faint path traced by the sun. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

The all-sky image released today shows us how the cosmos would look if our eyes could detect radiation 150 million times more energetic than visible light. The view merges LAT observations spanning 87 days, from August 4 to October 30, 2008. See:
Fermi’s Best-Ever Look at the Gamma-Ray Sky

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Talking About How We See Reality

Donal Hoffman’s TED presentation

  We’re inclined to think that perception is like a window on reality as it is.The theory of evolution is telling us that this is an incorrect interpretationof our perceptions.Instead, reality is more like a 3D desktopthat’s designed to hide the complexity of the real worldand guide adaptive behavior.Space as you perceive it is your desktop.Physical objects are just the icons in that desktop.

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Nima Arkani-Hamed – Physics and Mathematics for the End of Spacetime

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Quantum Mechanics and Spacetime – MESSENGER Lecture 1 – Nima Arkani-Hamed

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Step Inside the Perimeter

Just one breakthrough in theoretical physics can change the world. Perimeter Institute was created to accelerate breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe. The science is complex, but the basic Perimeter equation is simple: Bright Minds. Illuminating Ideas. Brilliant Future. Be part of the equation:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca
http://www.insidetheperimeter.ca
http://www.facebook.com/pioutreach
http://www.twitter.com/perimeter

Perimeter’s charitable registration number: 88981 R323 RR0001

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Third Quasicrystal Found

By Paul J. Steinhardt et al. – http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150313/srep09111/full/srep09111.html, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40522020

Quasicrystals1,2, short for quasiperiodic crystals, are solids able to violate the conventional rules of crystallography because their structure is “quasiperiodic” rather than periodic; that is, their atomic density can be described by a finite sum of periodic functions with periods whose ratio is irrational. Their diffraction pattern consists of true Bragg peaks whose positions can be expressed as integer linear combinations of D integer linearly independent wavevectors where D is greater than the number of space dimensions. Among the quasicrystals made in the laboratory, many exhibit a crystallographically forbidden, three-dimensional icosahedral symmetry defined by D = 6 integer linearly independent wavevectors. See: Collisions in outer space produced an icosahedral phase in the Khatyrka meteorite never observed previously in the laboratory

Bindi, L. et al. Collisions in outer space produced an icosahedral phase in the Khatyrka meteorite never observed previously in the laboratory. Sci. Rep. 6, 38117; doi: 10.1038/srep38117 (2016).

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Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?

Does Consciousness Disappear in Dreamless Sleep?: Consciousness is often said to disappear in deep, dreamless sleep. We argue that this assumption is oversimplified. Unless dreamless sleep is defined as unconscious from the outset there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for saying that a range of different types of sleep experience, some of which are distinct from dreaming, can occur in all stages of sleep. We introduce a novel taxonomy for describing different kinds of dreamless sleep experiences and suggest research methods for their investigation.

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Dark Matter Not So Rough Around the Edges

Analysis of a giant new galaxy survey, made with ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope in Chile, suggests that dark matter may be less dense and more smoothly distributed throughout space than previously thought. An international team used data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) to study how the light from about 15 million distant galaxies was affected by the gravitational influence of matter on the largest scales in the Universe. The results appear to be in disagreement with earlier results from the Planck satellite. Credit: Kilo-Degree Survey Collaboration/H. Hildebrandt & B. Giblin/ESO

Hendrik Hildebrandt from the Argelander-Institut für Astronomie in Bonn, Germany and Massimo Viola from the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands led a team of astronomers [1] from institutions around the world who processed images from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS), which was made with ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) in Chile. For their analysis, they used images from the survey that covered five patches of the sky covering a total area of around 2200 times the size of the full Moon [2], and containing around 15 million galaxies. See:  Dark Matter May be Smoother than Expected

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The Flow In our Lives

In positive psychology, flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does. Named by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields (and has an especially big recognition in occupational therapy), though the concept has existed for thousands of years under other guises, notably in some Eastern religions.[1] Achieving flow is often colloquially referred to as being in the zone.

Flow shares many characteristics with hyperfocus. However, hyperfocus is not always described in a positive light. Some examples include spending “too much” time playing video games or getting side-tracked and pleasurably absorbed by one aspect of an assignment or task to the detriment of the overall assignment. In some cases, hyperfocus can “capture” a person, perhaps causing them to appear unfocused or to start several projects, but complete few.  Flow (psychology)

The standard definition seems to be lacking for me in terms of the experience as that flow had come to me with meaning. At its most deepest levels the experience had an alignment with all aspects of my experiences in life, as if lead to it. These pathways,  as if by laying all these lines over top one another according to an arrow of time.  It is where all these lines crossed.

While on the larger scale of experience, an objectification of actions, at the same time a subjective interpretation, becomes a pathway of expression of experiencing. This to me was like seeing qualitative equations underlying our expression of the words and experiences according too. An geometrical expression of the human experience. That, if one goes backward to a source, it would be like becoming in touch with this stream…..the flow that one touches, as if dipping a finger into the current described as the flow of life….the energy of our life expression. Once connected,  totally immersed.

I talked about this with regard to a fighting aspect in hand to hand, as a momentum felt in a circular motion, as if one used to propel this momentum through a continued force of expression. I saw this in light of Lagrangian understanding as using this to propel satellites further onward to other planets.

 In terms of Lagrangian, one is looking for the least resistance….to see that life expression always finds the fastest route and as fleeting as Deja Vu human perception is capable of perceiving that time frame.

 One has to find this subjective location in life as toward one understanding where these lines cross.  You would understand that it allows for such a pathway to have expressed itself as the life experience.

 In another form of expression I see this flow, as a connection to the arrow of time, as one would regard confirmation of life according to its enforcement as  in the deja Vu experience. One would think a predetermination as a loss in will, but this is contrary to not living our life plan as we had choose it. So one can see, how a choice was made to enter here into this life experience…..and that we choose other routes willingly

 Psychology(flow) had quite a list, and one of those stood out was the poetry…..as if to be consumed by the rise and fall of the rhythms inherent in the words of expression.  Again at the most deepest levels of these are as a subjective experience, that becomes a undifferentiated of any other.

 
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