Felix Baumgartner Skydives From The Edge Of Space [11 High Quality Photos] Red Bull is supposed to give you wings bit that would only slow Felix Baumgartner down. This week the daredevil made a test skydive from 18 miles up in preparation for his upcoming jump from 120,000 feet (22 miles) in which he hopes to reach speeds of 690 MPH and be the first person the break the sound barrier. In the latest test jump Felix went 0 to 509 MPH in just 30 seconds and all that is without the aid of a plane fo rocket, just pure gravity baby! Felix Baumgartner hugs Capcom 1 USAF Col (ret) Joe Kittinger after his 96,640 ft free fall from the stratosphere making them the only two people to freefall from that high an altitude. Felix Baumgartner gets lifted up to enter into the capsule. Pilot Felix Baumgartner of Austria sits in the capsule before lift off at the flight line. The weather and wind conditions aligned perfectly as the balloon lifts up during the second manned test flight for Red Bull Stratos. The capsule preparing for lift off as the 342 ft balloon fully inflates.
Artist Takes Every Drug Known to Man, Draws Self Portraits After Each Use This is all kinds of cool, and everything your mother told you not to do. Bryan Lewis Saunders is an artist from Washington D.C., not just any artist though. Saunders prefers to take a more unconventional approach to his artwork. Arguably his most interesting project, entitled DRUGS is described as follows: Below, you can view a collection of portraits Saunders drew while under the influence of various substances ranging from cocaine, to marijuana, to DMT. Abilify / Xanax / Ativan 90mg Abilify 1 sm Glass of “real” Absinth 10mg Adderall 10mg Ambien Bath Salts 15mg Buspar (snorted) 4 Butalbitals Butane Honey Oil 250mg Cephalexin 1/2 gram Cocaine Computer Duster (2 squirts) 2 bottles of Cough Syrup 1 “Bump” of Crystalmeth 4mg Dilaudid 1 shot of Dilaudid / 3 shots of Morphine 60mg Geodon Hash Huffing Gas Huffing Lighter Fluid 7.5mg Hydrocodone / 7.5mg Oxycodone / 3mg Xanax 3mg Klonopin 10mg Loritab Marijuana (Kine Bud) G13 Marijuana Morphine IV Psilocybin Mushrooms (2 caps onset) 2mg Nicotine Gum Nitrous Oxide 2mg Xanax
10451_earth.jpg (JPEG Image, 2560×1600 pixels) Asteroid Mining Venture Backed by Google Execs, James Cameron Unveiled A newly unveiled company with some high-profile backers — including filmmaker James Cameron and Google co-founder Larry Page — has announced plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as precious metals and water. Planetary Resources, Inc. intends to sell these materials, generating a healthy profit for itself. But it also aims to advance humanity's exploration and exploitation of space, with resource extraction serving as an anchor industry that helps our species spread throughout the solar system. "If you look at space resources, the logical next step is to go to the near-Earth asteroids," Planetary Resources co-founder and co-chairman Eric Anderson told SPACE.com. "They're just so valuable, and so easy to reach energetically. Near-Earth asteroids really are the low-hanging fruit of the solar system." Planetary Resources is officially unveiling its asteroid-mining plans at 1:30 p.m. Precious metals and water "We're going to go to the source," Anderson said. The plan
Solar System Scope The Supermassive Star Betelgeuse --Will Its Violent Death Impact Earth? The red giant, once so large it would reach out to Jupiter's orbit if placed in our own solar system, has shrunk by 15 percent over the past decade in a half, although it's just as bright as it's ever been. "To see this change is very striking," said retired Berkeley physics professor Charles Townes, who won the 1964 Nobel Prize for inventing the laser. "We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size." Betelgeuse, whose name derives from Arabic, is easily visible in the constellation Orion. It gave Michael Keaton's character his name in the movie "Beetlejuice" and was the home system of Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Red giant stars are thought to have short, complicated and violent lifespans. Betelgeuse, which is thought to be reaching the end of its lifespan, may be experiencing one of those collapses as it switches from one element to another as nuclear-fusion fuel.
Saturn's Jet Streams --Powered by Heat from Inside the Giant Planet Saturn's turbulent jet streams, regions where winds blow faster than in other places, churn east and west across the giant gas planet. Scientists have been trying to understand for years the mechanism that drives these wavy structures in Saturn's atmosphere and the source from which the jets derive their energy. In a new study scientists used images collected over several years by NASA's Cassini spacecraft to discover that the heat from within the planet powers the jet streams. Condensation of water from Saturn's internal heating led to temperature differences in the atmosphere. The temperature differences created eddies, or disturbances that move air back and forth at the same latitude, and those eddies, in turn, accelerated the jet streams like rotating gears driving a conveyor belt. A competing theory had assumed that the energy for the temperature differences came from the sun.
The Daily Galaxy (dailygalaxy) on Twitter Have an account? Sign in New to Twitter? Join Today » Forgot password? Already using Twitter via text message? Language: English Bahasa Indonesia Bahasa Melayu Dansk Deutsch Español Filipino Italiano Magyar Nederlands Norsk Polski Português Suomi Svenska Türkçe français Русский עִבְרִית اردو العربية فارسی हिन्दी ภาษาไทย 日本語 简体中文 繁體中文 한국어 The Daily Galaxy @ dailygalaxy The Great Discoveries Channel: Sci, Space, Tech USA/Silicon Valley · 9,594 Tweets 10,959 Following 191,390 Followers Follow The Daily Galaxy Full name Email Password Have an account? Tweets Following Followers Favorites Lists Recent images © 2012 Twitter About Help Terms Privacy Blog Status Apps Resources Jobs Advertisers Businesses Media Developers 16h The Daily Galaxy @ dailygalaxy EcoAlert: 100-Kilometer Wide Impact Crater Found in Greenland --Oldest Known on Planet dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012 … Expand Collapse Reply Retweeted Retweet Delete Favorited Favorite 19h The Daily Galaxy @ dailygalaxy 21h The Daily Galaxy @ dailygalaxy New message
The Milky Way's Alien Planets --160 Billion and Counting! (Weekend Feature) The Kepler Space Mission's search for habitable planets is in a tiny window representing 1/400th of the Milky Way. "We used to think that the Earth might be unique in our galaxy," said Daniel Kubas, of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. "But now it seems that there are literally billions of planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way." According to an analysis of Kepler data this past January, each of the 100 billion or so stars in our galaxy hosts at least 1.6 planets, bringing the number of likely exo worlds to more than 160 billion. Recent research conclude that large numbers of these exoplanets are likely to be small, rocky Earth-like low-mass planets, which appear to be much more abundant than large ones. "This statistical study tells us that planets around stars are the rule, rather than the exception," said study lead author Arnaud Cassan of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics. The Daily Galaxy via Kepler Mission and Nature
Spectacular Galaxy Clusters Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups (HCGs). With only a few member galaxies per group, HCGs are much smaller than the immense clusters of galaxies which lurk in the cosmos, but like the large galaxy clusters, some HCGs seem to be filled with hot, x-ray emitting gas. In fact, groups of galaxies like HCGs may be the building blocks of the large clusters. This false-color x-ray image from the orbiting Chandra Observatory reveals x-ray emission from the gas in one such group, HCG 62, above, in startling detail. In the image, black and green colors represent low intensities while red and purple hues indicate high x-ray intensities. At optical wavelengths, some HCGs make for rewarding viewing, even with modest sized telescopes. The Daily Galaxy via NASA, Chandra Observatory and Via
NewsFlash: Rumors Swirling that CERN will Confirm Existence of Higgs Boson Scientists at CERN might be on the verge confirming the existence of what they call the "Higgs boson", according to rumors circulating this week. Higgs, they believe, is a particle, or set of particles, that might give others mass. According to Columbia University mathematician, Peter Woit, "CERN will soon have to decide how to spin this: will they announce discovery of the Higgs, or will they wait for some overwhelmingly convincing standard to be met, such as 5 sigma in at least one channel of one experiment? The bottom line though is now clear: there’s something there which looks like a Higgs is supposed to look. Attention will soon move to seeing if this signal is exactly what the SM [Standard Model] predicts (e.g. will the excesses in different channels agree with SM predictions?)." The theory, developed by British physicist Peter Higgs in the 1960s. hypothesizes that a lattice, referred to as the Higgs field, fills the universe. The Daily Galaxy via:
After a 14-Year Search --Elusive Ancient Galaxy Found In the Hubble Deep Field Region of the Universe (above), an international team of astronomers managed for the first time to determine the distance of the galaxy HDF850.1, well-known among astronomers as being one of the most productive star-forming galaxies in the observable universe. The galaxy is at a distance of 12.5 billion light years when the universe was less than 10 percent of its current age. For the past 14 years, HDF850.1 has remained strangely elusive. Its location in space, specifically its distance from Earth – the subject of many studies – ultimately remained unknown. How was that possible? "A vast cloud of dust keeps HDF850.1 hidden from telescopes searching the universe in the visible light range, so even the Hubble Space Telescope can't see it," Robertson said. "Any clue we can get about how those early galaxies formed helps us better understand this process," Robertson said. The galaxy HDF850.1 was discovered in 1998. "Stars form in dense clouds of gas and dust.
Two New Alien Planets Discovered in Andromeda --"Resets the Bar for Weird" Astronomers are beginning to suspect that something unusual happens during the evolution of such solar systems that drives massive planets into kinds of close encounters. The presence of a stellar sibling orbiting both of the newly discovered solar systems may be a “smoking gun” clue that past interactions between the planets and these distant siblings is an important part of that process. One planet is located in the constellation Andromeda. Dubbed KELT-1b, it is so massive that it may better be described as a 'failed star' rather than a planet. A super hot, super dense ball of metallic hydrogen, KELT-1b is located so close to its star that it whips through an entire “yearly” orbit in a little over a day - all the while being blasted by six thousand times the radiation Earth receives from the sun. The planet appears to have been jostled in the past by a previously unknown distant binary companion star that is orbiting the KELT-1 solar system. The Daily Galaxy via Vanderbilt University
Largest Ever Water Reservoir Discovered in Space The reservoir is gigantic, holding 140 trillion times the mass of water in the Earth's oceans, and resides 10 billion light years away. Since astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early universe, the discovery of water is not itself a surprise, the Carnegie Institution, one of the groups behind the findings, said. The water cloud was found to be in the central regions of a faraway quasar. Quasars contain massive black holes that are steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out amounts of energy, the institution said in its statement. The quasar where the gigantic water reservoir is located is some 12 billion years old, only 1.6 billion years younger than the Big Bang. The discovery was part of a larger study of the quasar named APM 08279+5255, where the black hole is 20 billion times greater than the Sun. The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water.