1. Entanglement describes the liminal relationship between two quantum particles that exist in “superposition,” a mix of states that can only be resolved when a physical property is measured. Think of the transporter in Star Trek: When someone is transported to another location they are technically in two places — and two quantum states — at once until their pattern is completed. Scientists have actually transported data using entanglement over 89 miles. Another way to phrase it is: “measuring a property of one particle instantly determines the property of another,” and before that measurement is taken the particle exists in all states at once.

2. Superposition refers to the state in which two quantum objects are comprised of some combination of all the possible states of a system or as Wikipedia explains: “. . . if the world can be in any configuration, any possible arrangement of particles or fields, and if the world could also be in another configuration, then the world can also be in a state which is a superposition of the two, where the amount of each configuration that is in the superposition…” In the blast from the past commercial above, there is a quantum moment where the peanut butter and chocolate are neither peanut butter nor chocolate, but in a superposition of being both at once. Until you eat it. Then it’s just yummy.

3. Spin is what makes subatomic particles like electrons act like tiny bar magnets. Quantum mechanics allow subatomic particles to be in both an up and down position simultaneously.

4. Coherence refers to atomic particles acting in sync with one another, sort of like “a gathering of consummate musicians playing jazz together (‘quantum jazz’) where every single player is freely improvising from moment to moment and yet keeping in tune and in rhythm with the spontaneity of the whole. It is a special kind of wholeness that maximizes both local freedom and global cohesion.”

5. Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger, who also came up with the term “entanglement,” in 1935 to illustrate the conflict between how matter behaves on a micro as opposed to a macro level. In the experiment the cat is put in a box with hydrocyanic acid that may or may not be released, killing the cat. At this point the cat is in a state of superposition — both dead and alive — and the act of observing it dissolves that state and forces the cat into one state or the other.

6. SPIN STATE is a Science Fiction novel by Chris Moriarty about quantum entanglement, Bose-Einstein condensates, and coherence. I profiled the main character of the book, Lt. Catherine Li, as a Danger Gal Friday.

7. Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is created when elementary particles called bosons are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero. In this state quantum effects become observable on a macro level.

8. A spin bath is “a clutch of subatomic particles interacting cleanly enough to reveal quantum fluctuations spreading like ripples on a still pond.”

9. Entangled particles could travel as fast as 10,000 times the speed of light. Which kind of violates all the rules about space and time. Yay!

10. A bit has two possible states: 0 or 1. Picture it as an arrow on a sphere pointing to the north pole (1) or the south pole (0). A qubit is a quantum bit that can exist in any state in between 0 and 1 — and does exist in all of those states simultaneously until its state is measured.

11.Scientists have transmitted “a pair of entangled states of light into separate corners of an ultracold atomic cloud, stored them there briefly, and then sent them back on their separate ways without completely destroying the quantum link in the process.”

12. What’s an atomic cloud look like, you ask? You get one (an image of one) on your iPod with software called Atom in a Box. WANT.

13. An upcoming International Space Station experiment will test the transmission of photons from the Space Station to Earth using quantum entanglement. What do you want to bet the first message transmission will be “The cat is alive?”

We may have lost Pluto, but there are plenty of other planets in the universe worthy of holding our attention. Granted, these new kids on the block are outside of our solar system.

Left, the sunlit side of 51 Pegasi b, the first planet ever detected around a sun-like star. Image source: Extrasolar Visions.

(1) Gliese 581 d: About 20 light years from Earth, this is the third planet of the red dwarf star Gliese 581. Gliese 581 d is the only terrestrial exoplanet discovered that orbits close to the habitable zone of its star. This zone is sometimes called the “Goldilocks Zone” because it is neither too hot or too cold on the planet’s surface. Technically, Gliese 581 d resides outside this “Goldilocks Zone”, but the greenhouse effect may offset the tendency toward being too cold and create enough heat to support liquid water.

(2) 16 Cygni B b: This water cloud Jovian planet has a very eccentric orbit, which means the surface of the planet experiences extreme differences in temperature throughout its year. Just over every two years, the planet’s orbit swings from a Venus-like distance of 0.6 AUs to a distance of 2.7 AUs, further than Mars.

(3) Epsilon Eridani b: At 10 light years away, Epsilon Eridani b is the closest confirmed planet to our solar system. Because of its close proximity, Eridanus shows up in Science Fiction often, such as in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge and Robots and Empires; Greg Bear’s Eon; and C. J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union Universe.

(4) Lalande 21185 b: This unconfirmed planet is thought to orbit a red dwarf star approximately eight light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The fourth closest star to our solar system, Lalande is a variable flare star that periodically increases in brightness. Lalande 21185 b may lie just over 2 times the Earth-Sun distance (AU) to its star, may be about nine tenths of Jupiter’s mass, and likely has an atmosphere of mostly hydrogen and helium.

(5) 51 Pegasi b: This was the first planet discovered orbiting another sun-like star. 51 Pegasi b is a massive Jupiter-like planet orbiting at a distance far closer than Mercury, a distance thought to be impossible for its size at the time of discovery. Its sun-like star is large enough to be visible from Earth by the naked eye under dark sky conditions. Unofficially named Bellerophon, this gas giant’s atmosphere is thick enough not to be blown away by solar wind despite its close proximity.

(6) PSR 1257+12 A: One of the first exoplanets ever discovered, this planet is over 908 light years away in the constellation Virgo. PSR 1257+12 A has a mass similar to that of the moon, and long ago its volcanism and tectonics subsided. Probably heavily cratered, it likely is comprised mostly of heavy elements, like iron.

(7) Tau Boötis b: About 50 light years away, this planet is the hottest known exoplanet. It is so hot that it may have silicate clouds and it may be visibly red. Tau Boötis b orbits its star in a “torch orbit,” that is at a distance from less than one seventh that of Mercury’s from the Sun.

(8) 55 Cancri b: This planet orbits its start every 14.65 days and was the fourth known extrasolar planet. 55 Cancri b was discovered by detecting variations in its star’s radial velocity caused by the planet’s gravity.

(9) Upsilon Andromedae b: This planet is a “hot Jupiter” type, meaning that it is extremely hot due to proximity to its star, so hot that it may glow red and its heat prevents water clouds from forming. Occasionally referred to as Upsilon Andromedae Ab to distinguish it from the red dwarf star Upsilon Andromedae B, it is about 44 light-years away in the constellation of Andromeda.

(10) Iota Draconis b: This planet is the “first object of planetary size detected around a red giant star.” Located about 100 light years from Earth, Iota Draconis b is over 8 times the mass of Jupiter, but may in fact be a brown dwarf star.

(11) 79 Ceti b: This planet was one of the first planets of sub-Saturn mass to be discovered around sun-like stars. Over 100 light years from Earth, 79 Ceti b orbits its star every 75 days. At potentially 111 times the mass of Jupiter, the planet may in fact be a very dim brown dwarf star.

(12) HD 209458 b: Unofficially also known as Osiris, this planet orbits the Solar twin star HD 209458 in the constellation Pegasus, 150 light-years from Earth. With the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have detected sodium in the planet’s atmosphere.

(13) Rho Indi b: This planet is a water cloud Jovian type whose axis places Rho Indi b just outside the habitable zone. At over twice the mass of Jupiter, this planet orbits its star every 3.7 years.

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For more on exoplanets:
Space Topics: Extrasolar Planets
Physics World Extrasolar planets
The Planetary Society

You think space is empty? Well, it was before we started leaving junk up there.

Image courtesy NASA via NatGeo.

Debris comprised of thousands of nuts and bolts, defunct satellites, space probes, lost gloves, hatches, and paint fragments now orbit our planet. In 2000, NASA counted 8,927 man-made objects floating around the Big Blue Marble, 2,671 of which were satellites, 90 were space probes, and 6,096 were chunks of debris. One of the most well-known chunks of space junk was Skylab:

The most spectacular re-entry in the short history of the phenomenon was Skylab. Launched in 1973 (two years after Russia put its first space station into orbit), the first and only U.S. space station stumbled home six years later, part of it splashing into the Indian Ocean and another portion ending up in Australia.

Maybe I’m dating myself here, but as a kid when I learned about Skylab I wanted to be an astronaut. I had this fantastic pop-up book about the space station that fired up my imagination. I really don’t want to think of it as space junk.

This is an important issue. Not only are we mucking up the planet’s surface with junk, but our local space as well. To educate us all, I offer Thirteen Facts About Space Junk:

(1) That’s a lot of stuff. There are approximately 4 million pounds of stuff up there. Maybe we need a professional organizer? Maybe next season HGTV will have a new show called Organize Our Space (without using space bags).

(2) Size does matter. 110,000 total space debris objects measure 1 centimeter and larger.

(3) A speck of paint from a satellite once pitted a space shuttle window nearly a quarter-inch wide.

(4) The eye in the sky. According to Space.com, “[S]pace Command’s electronic eyes can spot a baseball-sized object up to about 600 miles high.”

(5) It’s older than our new president. The oldest object still in orbit is the second U.S. satellite called Vanguard I, which launched on 1958 and operated for only for 6 years.

(6) Now that’s a major wardrobe malfunction. In 1965 Gemini 4 astronaut Edward White lost a glove during the first American space walk. The glove stayed on orbit for a month at a speed of 28,000 km/h.

(7) Old but not forgotten. 22% of space debris are old spacecraft.

(8) The sky is falling! Big chunks of Skylab fell over western Australia in July 1979.

(9) In April 2000, over 700 pounds of debris from a Delta II second stage rocket used with the Space Shuttle fell on farms in Cape Town, South Africa.

(10) In January 1997, a 580-pound stainless-steel tank identical to the Delta II debris found in South Africa plowed into the ground in Georgetown, Texas and missed a house by only 50 yards.

(11) In March 2000, the nosecone for a solid rocket booster from a French Ariane 5 rocket washed onto a beach near Corpus Christi, Texas.

(12) As of 2000, the U.S. is responsible for more space debris than anyone else with 2,971 objects that do not include satellites or space probes. The former Soviet Union, however, has more potential space junk since it has launched the most satellites 1,335 (as opposed to 741 U.S. satellites).

(13) About 40% of ground-tracked space debris come from explosions, now running at four to five per year.

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Left, from Wikipedia, this photo is an “[I]nternal view of the JET tokamak superimposed with an image of a plasma taken with a visible spectrum video camera.”

(1) Stars are hot stuff. Nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars and happens when like-charged atomic nuclei join together to form a heavier nuclei.

(2) He’s not heavy, he’s my lower mass nuclei. Nuclear fusion can release or absorb energy relative to whether the nuclei have a mass lower than iron. If the nuclei have a mass lower than iron, the process releases energy, but if heavier than iron the process will absorb energy.

(3) The cycle of nuclear fusion in stars was worked out by Hans Bethe in the 1930s. In 1932 Mark Oliphant observed the fusion of hydrogen isotopes (light nuclei).

(4) As part of the Manhattan Project that created the nuclear bomb (which uses fission not fusion), Hungarian physicist Edward Teller pushed to create the “Super,” a bomb designed to use the force of a fission bomb detonation to ignite a fusion reaction in deuterium and tritium. “Super” seems kind of an understatement, ya think?

(5) The Joint European Torus (JET) is the largest nuclear fusion reactor ever built. It is located in the UK and experiments first began there in 1983. That’s more than a decade before the Large Hadron Collider was built. Neener neener.

(6) A tokamak is “a machine producing a toroidal magnetic field for confining a plasma” and is one of several types of magnetic confinement devices, such as that used for the JET. There must be naughty uber-nerd jokes about “magnetic confinement.” It’s not just my warped mind or anything, right?

(7) The Bussard Interstellar Ramjet is a theoretical spacecraft using fusion for propulsion and proposed in 1960 by physicist Robert W. Bussard. Science fiction writer Larry Niven popularized this method of space travel in his Known Space series of books. Carl Sagan also referenced this method in his Cosmos television series. Can’t…resist…must..say it… BILLIONS and BILLIONS. (Yes, I went there. After #6, this surprises you?)

(8) The Bussard Ramjet uses enormous electromagnetic fields as a scoop to collect and compress hydrogen from the gas and dust that fill the space between stars. “High speed forces the reactive mass into a progressively constricted magnetic field, compressing it until thermonuclear fusion occurs. The magnetic field then directs the energy as rocket exhaust opposite to the intended direction of travel, thereby accelerating the vessel.” (quote via Wikipedia)

(9) Inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) uses an electrostatic field to contain fusion plasma. This type of reactor is cheap to build, costing a few thousand dollars. While popular with hobbyists, the process has yet to produce power. A promising new concept called Periodically Oscillating Plasma Sphere (POPS) has been proposed that would mitigate power loss and might produce cheap fusion power. I’m all of out of naughty plasma containment jokes (but I welcome them in the comments).

(10) Bigger is better? Larger than JET, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is a magnetic confinement fusion reactor to be built in France and expected to produce its first plasma operation in 2018.

(11) Scientists are currently trying to build a rocket that utilizes the “charged debris from a proton/anti-proton annihilation” for propulsion. Essentially, fling a proton and an anti-proton at one another, capture the pions expelled from the reaction, and use the energy of these charged particles for thrust. I suspect this is something Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory attempted for his 6th grade science fair project. (This isn’t fusion, but bear with me, keep reading.)

(12) A antimatter-catalyzed fusion reaction could be used to power propulsion. A small amount of anti-protons are fired at a “fusion target” or nuclear fuel. The reaction heats the nuclear fuel enough to cause thermonuclear fusion. Evidently, this method could never produce enough power to be used as alternative energy source here on Earth, but it could theoretically power rockets and ships in space without the need to transport massive amounts of raw fuel. Is that sort of like when I eat chocolate and it catalyzes fat into some kind of thermonuclear fusion evidenced by the number on my bathroom scale?

(13) Time in a magnetic bottle. A Penning Trap collects anti-protons in a magnetic bottle, where the particles are kept cold by liquid nitrogen, helium and a stable magnetic field. (Also see this article for more information on how a Penning Trap might be used in an antimatter-catalyzed fusion reaction.)

Amazon Listmania for Science Fiction novels dealing with nuclear fusion.

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For Eric

Scientific research uncovers new facets of our world every day. Scientists have to name these discoveries and some of the ideas they come up with I find to be very amusing (especially physics). Below are thirteen of my favorite funny science terms. Any of these would make excellent geek band names.

1. Nanoputians or Nanoputian Molecules: These organic molecules form a structure that appears human. These molecules are named after the residents of Lilliput in the book Gulliver’s Travels. There’s even a whole Nanoputian family. See Ballet Dancer, left, which sort of reminds me of an XKCD strip.

2. Space Invader Tranposons: Transposons are “sequences of DNA that can move around to different positions within the genome of a single cell.” Space invader transposons are bits of DNA that infiltrate DNA via a horizontal transmission (passed from one unrelated individual to another) instead of other kinds of transposons that are transmitted vertically (from your parents) because they’ve infiltrated sex chromosomes or RNA. Kind of reminds me of the premises of X-Men or Heroes. Also, one such “jumping gene” is called Sleeping Beauty.

3. Sonic Hedgehog: No, it’s not the Sega Genesis game character, but this signaling molecule is named after that character due to a mutation connected to it that causes fly embryos to have spiky appendages. This molecule is fundamental not only to vertebrate development, but also triggers an undifferentiated brain cell to turn into a dopamine neuron.

4. Dark Strangelet: These “sub-stellar agglomerations of strange matter” are formed when neutronium — which is created inside super-dense neutron stars when “the protons and electrons in atomic nuclei fuse to become neutrons” — collapses into quarks. Think of it as huge amounts of pressure squashing elemental particles into even itty-bittier particles. This is called “quark matter” or “strange matter.” Dark strangelets are thought to possibly occur when isolated pockets of strange matter exist, maintain their deep gravity well properties, and overwhelm all matter around it.

5. Naked singularity: There might be a naked singularity at the center of Sagittarius A. A naked singularity is theorized to be just like other singularities except that it doesn’t have an event horizon, so light (and conceivably other objects, I imagine) can escape and events inside of it can be observed from the outside. A naked singularity is a black hole going commando.

6. Spaghettification: This refers to the distortion an object experiences as it nears the event horizon of a black hole. First an object splits in half, then those halves into four, then into eight pieces. This decomposition process continues until an object is split into atoms and becomes a string of elemental particles.

7. Sparticles: Theoretically, when elemental particles such as leptons, photons, and quarks were produced in the Big Bang, each was accompanied by a matching sparticle: sleptons, photinos and squarks. I still want to hear Gerry Butler yell “This is sparticle!”

8. Big Bang Theory: “Our whole universe was in a hot dense state; Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait…The Earth began to cool; The autotrophs began to drool, Neanderthals developed tools; We built a wall (we built the pyramids); Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries; That all started with the big bang!”

9. ACHOO: Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst syndrome happens when you walk outside into bright sunlight and start sneezing your head off. Gesundheit.

10. Nibble: Eight bits make a byte. Four bits make a nibble. So, that means two nibbles make a byte.

11. Gluon: These elementary particles keep quarks stuck together.

12. Flavor: In particle physics, flavor is “the property that distinguishes different members in the two groups of basic building blocks of matter, the quarks and the leptons.” Please tell me someone has already done an LOLCat about a lepton that “haz flavor.”

13. Harry Potter gene: This is a gene that triggers the hormonal cascade initiating puberty. Harvard researchers discovered the gene while studying a family in Saudi Arabia where several members never experienced puberty.

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1. The Large Hardron Collider (LHC) is the “world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex,” and its purpose is to test the current standard theory of particle physics. Shiny.

2. The LHC collides beams of protons with the hopes of finding the elusive Higgs Boson. This finding would confirm some suppositions about particle physics, such as how elementary particles (i.e., quarks and leptons etc.) acquire mass. It would bring us closer to formulating a Grand Unified Theory, which unifies three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. The theory leaves out only gravity, which always gets me down.

3. Firing up the LHC might destroy life as we know it. By recreating the Big Bang environment scientists could potentially create a new black hole every second. Stephen Hawking has countered this and stated that these tiny black holes should lose more mass than they absorb and evaporate within a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. So, we all trust Steve, right?

4. The first beams were circulated through the collider on September 10, 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned for October 21, 2008.

5. The collider tunnel contains two adjacent pipes each holding a proton beam, a type of hadron. The two beams travel in opposite directions around the ring. Almost two thousand magnets keep the beams on their circular path and maximize the chances of the beams crossing. Is anyone else having a Ghostbusters flashback? Don’t cross the beams and don’t feed it after midnight.

6. Stephen Hawking hopes we actually do not find the Higgs Boson particle: “I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of $100 that we won’t find the Higgs.” In this scenario Hawking hopes to discover superpartners, particles that would be supersymmetric partners to particles already known. “Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together. Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe,” he said.

7. The LHC experiments might also uncover why there seem to be symmetry violations between matter and anti-matter. We might also learn more about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Sorry, captain, I can’t push the anti-matter drive any faster without more dilithium crystals!

8. The LHC experiments might prove or disprove the extra dimensions postulated by string physics. I hope it uncovers a Chocolate Dimension and a Calories-Don’t-Count-Here dimension — and preferably a worm hole connecting the two.

9. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) built the Large Hadron Collider and may upgrade the facility’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a particle accelerator, in ten years. Does anyone else think that the Super Proton Synchrotron could kick Megatron’s a$$?

10. Tevatron is a circular particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and was the highest energy particle collider in the world until the the Large Hadron Collider was built. I hope they enjoyed their fifteen minutes of fame.

11. According to Wikipedia, “[T]he Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC) is a name for a hypothetical future hadron collider with performance significantly beyond the Large Hadron Collider.” The Very Very Very Very Gigantic Hadron Collider, slated to be built in 2025, goes up to 11.

12. A hadron is composed of quarks bound up together by a strong nuclear force, similar to how atoms are held together by electromagnetic force. Protons and neutrons are hadrons. The LHC may uncover the existence of other elementary particles called “sparticles.” Theoretically, when particles such as leptons, photons, and quarks were produced in the Big Bang, each was accompanied by a matching sparticle: sleptons, photinos and squarks. How funny would it be to get Gerry Butler to yell out “THIS IS A SPARTICLE!”?

13. The Higgs boson, called the “God Particle” in pop culture, is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs Boson is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed and was named after Peter Higgs, British theoretical physicist and an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Read more about the Large Hadron Collider:

30 stunning images of the Large Hadron Collider

Despite Rumors, Black Hole Factory Will Not Destroy Earth

Stephen Hawking: Large Hadron Collider vital for humanity

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Here are thirteen of my favorite how-tos from Wired’s How-to Wiki collection:

1. Build Your Own ‘Iron Man’ Armor. Of course mine would have the same “accessory” found on Clooney’s Batman costume.

2. Check Yourself for Genetic Abnormalities. Don’t they mean polymorphisms?

3. Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. A miracle drug to avoid vertigo and the city of blinding lights.

4. Build An Earthquake Proof Wine Cellar. Me and my B*tch grenache will be perfectly OK during a 4.5 on the Richter.

5. Make Ice Cream Like a Mad Scientist. I hope this shows up in a future Dr. Horrible episode.

6. Master Your iPhone. Is that like being master of your own domain?

7. Be Geekier Than Thou. Buckaroo Banzai is the shiz.

8. Plan a Solar Eclipse Excursion. I see five lights! (Don’t get it? See #7)

9. Survive a Zombie Apocalypse. If you hear “Thriller,” RUN.

10. Build an Army of Followers. Sleeping is overrated, isn’t it?

11. Become An English Humor Afficianado. No mention of AbFab. Really?

12. Win at Rock Paper Scissors. Yep, show those kindergardeners who’s boss.

13. Cut Your Cancer Risk. None of these are fun.

I’d really like to see Wired add one for How To Win An Iron Chef Title. (Did I mention #7?)

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1. And yet it moves. The idea of relativity was discovered, not invented, by Galileo Galilei in 1639 “when he showed that a falling object behaves the same way on a moving ship as it does in a motionless building.”

2. There’s nothing relative about it. Einstein never used the term “relativity,” instead preferring “invariance theory.” Because the laws of physics appears the same to all observers, there’s nothing “relative” about it.

3. And you thought it was Picard. The idea of the space-time continuum was devised by Hermann Minkowski. From Wikipedia: “By 1907 Minkowski realized that the special theory of relativity, introduced by Einstein in 1905 and based on previous work of Lorentz and Poincaré, could be best understood in a four dimensional space, since known as ‘Minkowski spacetime,’ in which the time and space are not separated entities but intermingled in a four dimensional space-time, and in which the Lorentz geometry of special relativity can be nicely represented.”

4. Verdammt! Austrian physicist Friedrich Hasenöhrl published the basic equation E = mc2 a year before Einstein did, but he failed to connect the equation with the principle of relativity.

5. Now der are two of dem. There are two relativities: Special relativity and general relativity. The former applies to objects moving at constant speed and the latter explains acceleration and gravity.

6. OOPSY. The early version of general relativity had a major error, a miscalculation of the amount a light beam would bend due to gravity.

7. But this one goes up to eleven. No physical object can travel at or faster than the speed of light. The speed of light is generally considered to be a physical speed barrier.

8. It’s all relative? Matter determines how space curves. Curved space determines how matter moves.

9. Not over the hill yet. The age of the universe is widely believed to be 12 to 13 billion years old, and still expanding as a result of the ‘big bang’. This produces a type of horizon in space, where light has not yet reached Earth from objects further away than 12 to 13 billion light years.

10. Best. Costume. Ever. The Doppler effect causes objects moving away to have their light spectrum red-shifted while objects approaching have their light blue-shifted. This really means that the wavelengths of light they radiate (or reflect) are moved downward or upward on the frequency spectrum. These measurements were the first clue that the universe is expanding.

11. Happy Earth Rotation Day. One second is exactly 9,192,631,770 beats of a Cesium atom, very close to 1/(24 x 60 x 60) of an ‘earth rotation’ day. An earth rotation day is the varying time it takes for the earth to rotate once relative to the sun.

12. Way more productive than checking your Gmail for the 100th time. Einstein’s full-time job at the Swiss patent office meant he had to hash out relativity during hours when nobody was watching. He would cram his notes into his desk when a supervisor came by.

13. Rules are relative too. According to Einstein, nothing travels faster than light, but space itself has no such speed limit; immediately after the Big Bang, the runaway expansion of the universe apparently left light lagging way behind.

Source: Discover Magazine’s 20 Things You Didn’t Know and Einstein’s Relativity Facts.

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1. Just about every astronaut experiences some space sickness.

2. Because fluids shift upward in zero G, living in space means sinus congestion, kidney stones, constipation, and a shrunken heart.

3. Less pressure on the spine in zero G will make you two inches taller.

4. No humans have yet to be conceived in space.

5. You might suffer from insomnia living in space: 16 sunrises a day throws a major wrench into astronauts’ circadian rhythms.

6. If exposed to the vacuum of space without a suit on, don’t hold your breath: Sudden decompression would cause your lungs to rupture.

7. Breast implants might explode in a vacuum.

8. Today’s astronauts can spice up their meals with liquid salt and pepper since sprinkled grains would float away, tickling noses and clogging vents.

9. “The shuttle commode requires that astronauts align themselves precisely in the dead center of the seat. A mock-up of the shuttle toilet, complete with built-in camera, is used to train them how to position themselves.”

10. Landing back on Earth is called “the second birth” because returning astronauts report extreme difficulty moving their arms and legs right after touchdown.

11. “Eighteen people have died on space missions, but never in space—always on the way up or the way down.”

12. “Early astronauts relied on aluminum tubes of semiliquid mush, food cubes, and dehydrated meals.”

13. “A 2001 study showed that astronauts who snored on Earth snoozed silently in space.”

Source: Discovery Magazine

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1. How to make a Han Solo in carbonite chocolate bar.
2. How to build an alternative Han Solo blaster.
3. How to make an LED blaster.
4. How to knit a Princess Leia wig.
5. How to build a cardboard Boba Fett costume
6. How to carve a Darth Vader pumpkin.
7. How to build a Darth Vader Lego mosaic.
8. How to build a cheap custom lightsaber.
9. How to build a carbonite Han USB flash drive.
10. How to turn your RAZR into a Star Trek tricorder.
11. How to make a Han Solo ‘en-queso’d in carbonite’ queso dish
12. How To make cool Star Wars sound effects with a Slinky
13. DIY Flux Capacitor

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