Miscellaneous science stuff! Add if you wish. This week: This Week At NASA May the four fundamental forces of nature be with you.
I was at Nasa a few weeks ago for a job interview. I forgot to take a cap (as it was snowing that week in Chicago and it was hidden in a cupboard) and so I got a sunburned head.
Another one from the same series. This one, I particularly like. Niagara Straw What would happen if one tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw? Answer here: https://what-if.xkcd.com/147/
Oh... No, not that direction. When I was laid off from the teaching position I held at a university in the early 80s I was offered what's called a 'limited duty commission' with the US Navy. I would have become an instructor with a rank of Lieutenant (which equals Captain in the Army). I wouldn't have been what they call "Command" something or other...being the captain of a ship. I just would have putzed with science-y stuff. Good chance that I'd have been eligible for NASA at some point, or perhaps even making Admiral. Spouse, who wasn't spouse at the time, wasn't interested in being what they call a 'Navy wife'. It isn't easy. So...i became an artist instead. Sometimes I ponder where I would find myself now had I gone that route. I don't regret my decision, but I wonder.
The latest snapshots of the Western Hemisphere were taken by a GOES-17 instrument called the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), which scans the planet in 16 spectral bands, including visible, infrared, and near-infrared channels. animated version here: https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/31/...ages-noaa-earth-abi-instrument-cooling-system
Clouds Cast Thousand-Mile Shadows into Space When Viewed Aboard the ISS ...One of his favorite things to shoot are the shadows cast by clouds, something that appears surprisingly dramatic from space. Dense cloud formations can create long shadows that stretch for thousands of miles across the Earth’s surface as they eventually disappear into a black horizon.
PIGEON THERMOREGULATION A CT scan of a pigeon injected with the contrast agent BriteVu shows every blood vessel and capillary in the bird.
Breathing is a good of analogy for this. Because there’s more landmass in the northern hemisphere, atmospheric CO2 levels change annually and are lower when its summer in the northern hemisphere as plants grow and bloom, and CO2 is taken in. The overall trend is towards higher average levels year on year, however.
