ideonexus

Category: Ionian Enchantment

  • The Sixth Mass Extinction

    Artist’s Impression of the Chicxulub Impact Image courtesy of NASA The most famous mass extinction is the Cretaceous-Tertiary, which killed the dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago. It was most likely caused by a meteorite that left a crater 150 miles in diameter off the Gulf of Mexico and a layer of iridium-rich dust all over…

  • Future Wonder of the World: Three Gorges Dam

    Three Gorges Dam Before Filling Reservoir Image Courtesy Wikimedia Click for a Larger Image When Three Gorges Dam goes fully online in China in 2009, after 17 years of construction, it will be 607 feet high and 1.4 miles long. Its reservoir will be 410 miles in length and 3,700 feet in width. It will…

  • Ant Farm Woes

    Not My Ant Farm Photo by jurvetson (Who has a lot of cool Science Flickr Sets) Last year I finally bought myself an Ant Farm, one of those new, hip gel ant farms, this one from Uncle Milton Industries. I’ve always procrastinated about buying one of these because I’m an instant-gratification kind of person, and…

  • Off-World Environmentalism: Fighting Space Pollution

    Tracked Debris Orbiting Earth Photo by NASA All the politicians and military strategists were buzzing about China’s missile test in January 2007, where the country blew up one of its old satellites in orbit. After the debates about the diplomatic and militaristic implications of this demonstration had settled down, scientists took the opportunity to get…

  • Super Science Ninja Squad: Alan Turing

    Sadly, after his chemical castration, Turing committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple.

  • The Digital Big-Bang

    One Gigabyte 20 Years Ago (left) One Gigabyte Today (Right) source Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This…

  • Science Yearbook 2007

    Politics “Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.” – ExxonMobil Advertisement 1977 Political Interference Cartoon This year the biggest political target was Global Warming Theory on this the 10th Anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol with the U.S. the Last Country Not to Sign treaty. While ExxonMobil offered $10k to any scientist who…

  • “Life Flows on Within You Without You”

    World clock in Ulm, Germany Tempus Fugit In the last second, cesium-133 atoms around the world oscillated through 9,192,631,770 radiation cycles in atomic clocks measuring International Atomic Time (TAI)*. While you read the previous sentence, 400,000 billion neutrinos from the sun passed through you*. By the time you finish reading this paragraph, you will have…

  • We Live in the Cosmic Boondocks

    I hate living in the boonies. No, I’m not referring to Northeastern North Carolina, I’m referring to our location on a scope that surpasses geography and ventures into cosmology. Our sun is one of about 200 billion stars swirling around in a galaxy that’s a 100,000 light years across. If only 10 percent of those…

  • 50th Anniversary of Kudryavka (Laika)

    “Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. We treat them like babies who cannot speak. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.” ” – Oleg Gazenko, leading…

  • “How To Fly” Published at the Science Creative Quarterly

    The Science Creative Quarterly posted my article How To Fly: Also, LOLQuacks has posted my LOLStevenMilloy photo. “The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss” With these words, Douglas Adams helpfully explained concept of flying in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But the ground is really big,…

  • 50th Anniversary of Sputnik

    “The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.” – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky When I was a toddler, my parents lived in Daytona Beach, Florida, and Cape Canaveral was just 70 miles south of us. From there, we could watch NASA’s rocket launches from our balcony. I can vaguely remember…