What are those colorful rings around the Sun? A corona visible only to Earth observers in the right place at the right time. Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Sun or Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of... Continue Reading →
Billions of years in the future, our dead sun will morph into a giant cosmic jewel, a new study suggests. Like the vast majority of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, the sun will eventually collapse into a white dwarf, an... Continue Reading →
The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy runs through this complex and beautiful skyscape. Seen toward colorful stars near the northwestern edge of the constellation Vela (the Sails), the 16 degree wide, 200 frame mosaic is centered on the glowing filaments of the Vela... Continue Reading →
In numerical analysis, Newton's method (also known as the Newton–Raphson method), named after Isaac Newton and Joseph Raphson, is a method for finding successively better approximations to the roots (or zeroes) of a real-valued function. The idea of the method is as follows: one starts with an initial guess which is... Continue Reading →
Consciousness is everything people experience — from the taste of chocolate to the pain of a migraine, the disappointment of failing an exam to the thrill of holding a newborn baby. But the origin and nature of consciousness have puzzled... Continue Reading →
Ask anyone if they remember where they ate the juiciest burger, the sweetest cupcake or the smoothest bisque, and they probably can describe the location in great detail, down to the cross streets, the décor, and the table where they... Continue Reading →
They may look like modern mechanical dinosaurs but they are enormous swiveling eyes that watch the sky. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) Observatory is composed of four 12-meter reflecting-mirror telescopes surrounding a larger telescope housing a 28-meter mirror. They are designed to detect... Continue Reading →
People with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music, according to a study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas and UCLA. The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy... Continue Reading →
Anatomical drawing: showing ligaments and muscles of left side of face and (extended) arm. By Antonio Scarpa, 1804.
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