Software Libre y demás curiosidades :)
Reblogged from scientificillustration
Sarah Stone (British, 1761/62–1844)
Malabar ShrikeThe Morgan Library
Reblogged from likeaphysicist
Planck Time
What is the smallest unit of time you can conceive? A second? A millisecond? Hard to say seeing as how time is relative. Under the right circumstances, hours can fly by and seconds can feel like a lifetime. But unfortunately for physicists, time is not something that can be delt with so philosophically. And since they deal with cosmological forces both infinitesimally large and small, they need units that can objectively measure them. When it comes to dealing with the small, Planck Time is the measurement of choice. Named after German physicist Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, a unit of Planck time is the time it takes for light to travel, in a vacuum, a single unit of Planck length. Taken together, they part of the larger system of natural units known as Planck units.
Originally proposed in 1899 by German physicist Max Planck, Planck units are physical units of measurement defined exclusively in terms of five universal physical constants. These are the Gravitational constant (G), the Reduced Planck constant (h), the speed of light in a vacuum (c), the Coulomb constant(ke or k), and Boltzmann’s constant (kB, sometimes k). Each of these constants can be associated with at least one fundamental physical theory: c with special relativity, G with general relativity and Newtonian gravity, with quantum mechanics, with electrostatics, and kB with statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. They were invented as a means of simplifying the particular algebraic expressions appearing in theoretical physics, especially in quantum mechanics.
Ultimately, Planck time is derived from the field of mathematical physics known as dimensional analysis, which studies units of measurement and physical constants. The Planck time is the unique combination of the gravitational constant G, the relativity constant c, and the quantum constant h, to produce a constant with units of time. They are often semi-humorously referred to by physicists as “God’s units” because eliminate anthropocentric arbitrariness from the system of units, unlike the meter and second, which exist for purely historical reasons and are not derived from nature. Some challenges to Planck’s Time have been mounted. For example, in 2003 during the analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope Deep Field images, some scientists speculated that where there are space-time fluctuations on the Planck scale, images of extremely distant objects should be blurry. The Hubble images, they claimed, were too sharp for this to be the case. Other scientists disagreed with this assumption however, with some saying the fluctuations would be too small to be observable, others saying that the speculated blurring effect that was expected was off by a very large magnitude. A unit of Planck Time can be expressed (in the third picture).
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/79418/planck-time/#ixzz2U4Nz4Ov1
Reblogged from scientificillustration
Another of the extinct bird series…. unfinished at the moment but I’m pretty happy with it so far. need to back off on the intensity of the blue. Mauritius Blue Pigeons, gouache.
:(
Reblogged from natgeofound
View of the Palace of Maharaja’s pond from the Island of the Sultans in Udaipur, India, 1923.
Photograph by Jules Gervais Courtellemont, National Geographic
Reblogged from scientificillustration
TOP: Anatomy of a Bacteriophage
MIDDLE: A Bacteriophage Attacking a Bacterium
BOTTOM: What a Phage Does to its HostThe cycle begins when the virus uses its tail fibers to attach itself to its victim. The details of what happens next vary, but the process is always the same: the phage’s genetic material, which is located in its head, enters the bacterium.
Here, we’ll use T4, a well-studied phage infecting the Escherica coli bacterium, as an example.
(1) T4 contracts its tail sheath which pushes a tube located within the tail through the membrane of the bacterial cell.
(2) The phage’s DNA is passed through the tube into the cell, where it takes control, brutally stops many of its vital functions and forces it to churn out new virus components – heads, tails, tail fibers – in production-line style.
(3). Finally, enzymes dissolve the wall of the bacterium from the inside and the newborn bacteriophages reach the exterior, ready to attack new victims.
(4) But these viruses proceed very selectively as they do so. Most of them attack only a subgroup of a single bacterial species. Generally, they don’t touch animal or human cells, which is why they are harmless to human beings.
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