astro picture for the day

Credit: Digitized Sky Survey, ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator
Color Composite: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory)

-----------------------------------extra goodie thought for the day----------------------------------------

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/21/chemputer-that-prints-out-drugs

As Chris Phoenix once said, just when one pathway to nanomanufacturing seems to be 'the' way, the other makes advances which puts it in the lead.  I've pointed out some great 3d-printing advances before; this one suggests that maybe soon, we could just print out a nanomanufacturing system.

astro picture for the day

Image Credit & Copyright: Sigurður Stefnisson

Astro picture for the day?  well, it is a surface phenomenon of a planet!  One of the great intellectual things of the twentieth century was that geology turned into planetology.

------------------------------------extra goodie for the day---------------------------------------------------

An actually working casimir affect micro-machine(can be extended to nano realm with all the latest nano-engineering advances of the past two or three decades since Casimir forces were confirmed experimentally I do believe around 1981). 

Smalley once severelly criticized the nano-community that nano-machines were impossible because of 'sticky fingers.'  He was meaning just ordinary chemical attractions.  Soon, people pointed out that the casimir force also might present a bit of problem.  Well, now, that problem looks to be solved to some degree. 

As always it should be exciting to see if there's rapid progress; the same manufacturing technologies that made this can integrate the patterns of this casimir force machine into various micro and nano machines that they've been making since the 1980s.

Note; when/if they start making micro/nano machines out of this breakthrough(the article sounded more than optimistic), they will be true quantum machines exploiting the casimir force; the casimir force has to do with simply putting two plates together in a 'vacuum.'  Only, according to quantum electrodynamics(Paul Dirac's generalization of the quantum mechanics created by Niels Bohr, Heisenberg and Shroedinger; it combines special relativity and not general and Shroedinger's quantum mechanics generalization of Niels Boh's quantum mechanics; yep, generalizations of generalizations; how far we've come!  We've now bagged a most remarkable quantum partilce- the Higgs!  Remember that!?LoL!), the vacuum is a sea of partilces coming in and out of existence within Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.  So, if you put to plates in a vacuum, you should limit the possible wavelengths in between them compared to the possibilities to the farthest reaches of the universe!  So, the plates should feel an inward force; they do!

astro picture for the day

Credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT Antu, ESO

An interstellar cloud that has collapsed enought o redden the stars on the opposite side from our view!

------------------------------------extra goodie for the day-----------------------------------------------------there's been all kinds of great scientific, technological advancements; but, i've been tired lately - sorry; but, this takes the cake!

http://phys.org/news/2012-07-gorillas-amazing-feat-intellectual-ability.html

Note, the article says they've suspected for awhile now that Gorillas have been able to do this.  Never the less, this is pretty advanced for most of what's been observed for Primates other than Homo Sapiens. Basically, they've got camera photage of Gorillas taking apart traps(not for them but for smaller prey).  The Gorillas  do so just in case the traps take some of their small children!  That's further impressive!

There's so much that can be said for this.  Why don't they advance?  What about our own history?  We've always wondered why the pace of technological and mathematical advancement has only really gotten going in the last ten thousand years.  And, even then, there were periods of not so much advancement as a previous period. One could argue that being forced to travel forced new thoughts; but, also coming back or meeting others that went another way and hence mixing those new thoughts to make even more new thoughts. There's also the issue of forgotten knowledge due to a tribe getting blasted by a meteorite, another tribe, volcanoes and so on; this sets them back to the stone age(figurativelly speaking!).  Not to mention the article says the Gorilla pointed, didn't use vocal language.  The evolution of vocal langauge obviously took awhile, and vocal language that we use is far more sophisticated than people assume most of the time; in some ways, new language words were new discoveries for Homo Erectus and Sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years!

astro picture for the day

Credit & Copyright: T. A. Rector (U. Alaska), T. Abbott, NOAO, AURA, NSF

One of my non-Hubble favorites; not sure If I've posted this before; can't believe I hadn't!

------------------------------------extra goodie for the day----------------------------------------------

I was rereading some Jacob Bronowski articles from "The Visionary Eye" a week or two ago.  He mentioned something that came up when talking to someone just an hour or so ago; so, I've decided it's important enough to mention.

People are forever trying to size down mathematical science by telling those who do mathematics about great art and artists.  But, what never gets mentioned is the mathematicians know, appreciate lots of great art.  But, the artists never know the great mathematics.  Sure, they've heard of maybe even gotten through a first semester of calculus; but, do they know about pythagorean triples?  The Greek initial efforts at a pellian equation to approximate the square root of two?  How about Archimedes logical proof and calculation of Pi?  Have they even heard of Euclid's "Elements"?  Appolonius's "conics"? The three delian problems; Pappas's theorem about projective geometry? Galois theory; do they know that groups and fields are more associated with algebra and Galois theory while rings have to do with number theory? How about David Hilbert's recasting of Euclidean geometry in terms of of his number fields, and the relation of projective geometry to algebras? Lie theory and it's relation to the classification of finite simple groups? Do they know how the effort to prove the Poincare conjecture led to much of the topology(and fields medals) of the 20th century?  How about abel's theorem and it's relations to algebraic geometry, and then Alain connes non-commutative geometry?  Have they heard of Cardano?  Ferrari?(cardano's student and colleague), How many mathematicians have the artists ever heard of?  Fermat by now!  How about Vieta?  Leonardo Euler, Lagrange, Gauss, Dirichlet, Riemann, Poincare, Hilbert, Emmy Noether, Emil Artin, Serre, William Thurston, Atiya, Alain Connes and plenty more!  No, they know nothing about mathematics! Once again, the non-mathematicians have everything backwards!

astro picture for the day

ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope image

---------------------------------extra goodies for the day-----------------------------------

http://www.uwindsor.ca/dailynews/2012-06-15/chemists-break-new-ground-in-molecular-machine-research

A major problem with dna-nanotech is the self-organisation occurs in solution/water.  One gets unwanted reactions; it's slow to self-organize.  Here, in the article linked above, we have regular molecular motors working in a solid.

I had heard of this a month ago or so;   I found this quote, "Since the Nature Chemistry article appeared, a number of leading chemistry publications around the world have been reporting on the team’s findings, Dr. Loeb said."  When you see the community getting excited and the result gets generalized, you know it's happening!

Combine these nanomechanical motors with graphene, buckyballs and other already atomically precise nanotechnologies, and one can see nanomanufacturing happening a lot quicker.

astro picture of the day

Credit & Copyright: Gemini Obs., AURA, NSF

------------------------------thought for the day extra-------------------------------------------------------------------Stephen Wolfram revisit---------------------------------------------------------

I don't want to repost that video.  The link at my first post of Wolframs video still works.

I want to say what I think solves Wolfram's problem.  Kurt Godel published his incompleteness theorems in 1931.  Since then, mathematicians and others have made a lot of it.  Stephen Wolfram seems to me to want to suggest that nature taps into some extra computational ability.  I'm not going to argue against Kurt Godel; those theorems are proved logicaly.

Let me just say what Jacob Bronowski says.  Jacob in his "Origin of Knowledge and Imagination" argues that a theory established finite boundaries in the infinit continuum of the universe.  These finite boundaries are inevitably incorrect somewhere.  Inevitably, we have to question our assumptions and expand our axioms, define our concepts more precisely. This corresponds to what Kurt Godel shows.  That a finite set of consistent axioms cannot prove an infinity of truths.  Eventually, in order to prove some theorem that cannot be proven in our finite set of axioms(our finite cut in the infinit continuum of the universe), we have to add in some axiom.  And, we have to do it off to infinity.

Wolfram is saying we just mine these things that are past our finite set of axioms.  I'm saying we just add another axiom.  But, I've gone further.

Jacob Bronowski considers a machine like a finite set of axioms; there's things it's good at and things it is not good at.  Any machine pushed beyond a certain limit breaks.  When a dynamical system is pushed beyond a certain point, it often reorganises itself, it often evolves new structureal order. I'm suggesting a correspondence between dynamical systems, bifercations to new states of order and adding new axioms.  This is how dna is imprinted as well. What was previously 'computational complex whole' that is unfathomable in a previous finite set of axioms is now a new syntheses and that 'computational complex whole' is now understood in a new higher framework.

astro picture for the day

Credit: Susan Stolovy (SSC/Caltech) et al., JPL-Caltech, NASA(spitzer space infrared telescope)

-----------------------------------------Arthur C Clarke Riddle of the Stones revisit!

I posted this before; but, 1) this is the whole video in one instead of three parts, and 2) there's been some recent thoughts about Stonehenge, and 3) my previous posting of this video doesn't function anymore.

Some archaeologists have come out and said unequivocally that Stonehenge was built by all the different groups of Britain to unify everyone.  My thought is how can you be sure?  My second thought is that the suggestion is a reasonable one.  As Arthur C Clarke's video shows, there were many stonehenges all over the place(really on the main European continent as well), and then, there is Stonehenge, a much larger stonehenge.   All one can do is say, maybe; one can chose to believe or not untill more evidence comes in.

astro picture for the day

Nasa Hubble space telescope image


this is the problem with all sports and anything else other than science; they are vague.

Sports like football(both american and soccer football), baseball, basketball, and so on; these sports are always changing the rules each year because someone finds a loophole. Some(like me) have tried to view racing like autoracing and running(I'm a cross country runner) would be more 'pure' sports where the rules are more clearly defined.

 The problem with racing is you know who's going to win; they guy with more money, or more horsepower, or better engineers. And then, the racing governing body puts in all kinds of stupid rules to artificially put the competition back in; today, F-1 has this stupid rear wing that can open a flap and allow the cars to go faster down the straight; only, the F-1 governing body has stepped in and made a rule to make the cars easier to pass(F-1 cars aerodynamics have created a bit of a competition problem; while the aerodynamics allows the care to go faster . .

 the cars behind that are faster can't get around slower cars because they ruin the air behind them). It's a total artificiality.

It's kind of curious how sports carried to logical conclusions involves science and technology; yet, the outcome is 'you know who's going to win if all things are set equal.' And then, they say things like 'ethical implications.'

  Ethical implications are a vague concept that people throw who have a personal problem with scientific progress. People are forever wearing punk clothes and then saying "hey, what are you looking at." Recently, some news guy was interviewing some mars direct guy about his one way to mars program funded by letting people watch it. The news guy snapped "but, aren't there ethical implications?" I mean that's like the spanish saying to columbus, well, what about the ethical implications of making people work hard, maybe they'll get killed or kill Japanese by some disease. No doubt, some people abused the exploration 

of the americas; but, humanity is a young primitive species; there's going to be growing pains. I've tried to get people get over their primitive beliefs here on physorg; and guess what, these people don't budge unless forced! If people don't want to think things out logicaly, factualy, scientificaly; I don't want to hear it with respect to this anti-science 'ethical implications' tactic.

For instance, the scientific viewpoint would be, face the facts, these sports are fundamentally flawed; go go mathematics and mathematical science instead; learn that the true purpose of mankind is to explore the universe; that is the true spirituality. That is the pure sports.

----------------i wrote the above in responce to a physorg article just now; i suppose I could link to it!

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-life-science-businessmen-genetically-athletes.html

astro picture for the day

Credit & Copyright: Brad Moore

This is the tarantula nebula of large megallanic cloud and not a star factory of our own galaxy; it's considered the largest star factory, well, of our galactic system!  I've seen a comparable star factory from the Hubble space telescope of a galaxy like fifteen million light years away or thereabouts; so far, I havn't been able to find that picture; but, I'll keep looking!

- some recent reading of mine is Frederick Gauss's method of least squares; it's a method of scientific data analyses; and, it came from Frederick Gauss's effort to compute asteroid orbits. The history of the discovery of asteroids is even more interesting.

Kepler and others had found a arithmetic progression that fit the majority of planetary orbits except for a gap between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter.  After a hundreds of years of telescope making, astronomer's had started finding 'asteroids' in this gap.  And so, the theory was saved; it's called bode's law.  Bode's law also fit the recent discovery of Uranus by William Herschel.  Out of all this came Frederick Gauss's least squares law and science and technology development was made more practical.  Just one more curious development that shows that exploring the universe pays off.

astro picture for the day

ESA/Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image

 . . . and just one more step on our journey to the stars(hopefully before our Star turns into a planetary nebula like the one above; of course, this will only happen like 4.5 billion years from now; actually, it's a gradual process; researchers have recently shown that the sun will become hotter within the next five hundred million years to make life uncomfortable here on Earth)

This research has been getting more attention recently; hence, why I've decided to post it  . . . somewhere on this blog!

quote for the day

"Science is rational because it is the unprejudiced discovery of the logic of nature." - Jacob Bronowski

thought for the day/ white magic and black magic

Jacob Bronowski in his "Magic, Science, and Civilization" considers science as white magic, and religion as black magic.  In his "Ascent of Man" episode/video one, at the end he notes the difference between those who try to conjure the universe through magic and those who try learn it through science. He say's that magic is a vague word; it says we have a power, but what power?  He explains black magic of religion and white magic of science further in his "Magic, Science, and Civilization."

He point out that religion and those who are into magic often have this idea of doing science by making nature go backwards.  He notes that witches are often depicted as riding their brooms backwards.

He further notes a 'black mass' celebrated backwards; i found this wiki,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_of_Saint-S%C3%A9caire

and then, there's Joshua 10:12-13 where Joshua makes the sun stand still.

This reminded me of an interesting passage of genesis; I managed to find it quickly enough; it is Genesis chapter 3 at the very end, God sets the cherubim back. Well, i'm not sure about this passage of the cheribum, a flashing sword.  It may not be the passage I'm thinking of; i'll try to read through genesis again to see what else I can find.

The point is that magic and religions often have this idea that the way to make nature work is by magic words, rituals which makes nature go backwards. Mathematical science gets at the underlying structural relations and tries to flow with nature; mathematical science tries to become harmonius with nature.

The anti-science religions are often dividing the universe from what is knowable from what is not knowable; they said the heavens were perfect and made of different substances; they said the human conscious was a separate spirit from the material body.  People are forever trying to blame mathematical science as the dividing us from the universe when it is mathematical science that shows the connections.  The religious seem to have their heads backwards.  Their always making vague words to play evasive games so they don't have to be disproved.  They first place their god in heaven, then they make him infinit, then say he's in another dimension, and then finaly, they resort to vague word games like faith, "god did it" "god works in mysterious ways"(when something bad happens which doesn't fit their faith).

- I've recently found some more cultish/religion turning things upside down and backwards in a symbol for satan.

The symbol for satan appears to be an upside down star. 

astro picture for the day

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto

I know I've recently shown a Hubble space telescope image of the Orion; but, this looks to be another improvement; hopefully, clicking it will give a blown up version which you can then see lots of goodies.

astro picture for the day

NASA Hubble Space Telescope

astro picture for the day

Credit & Copyright: Russell Croman

quote for the day

"Remember, then, that scientific thought is the guide of action; that the truth at which it arrives is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress; but human progress itself." William Kingdom Clifford

astro picture for the day

NASA Hubble Space Telescope image

astro picture for the day

Hubble Space Telescope image

astro picture for the day

Hubble Space Telescope image

quote for the day

"The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool." - Voltair

astro picture for the day

Hubble Space Telescope image

thought for the day/ the French intellectual tradition

I've pointed out that the mathematics gene(I don't believe in such a thing; i' m just half joking) seems to have taken hold in certain cultures at certain times and places.  And, as the fight against irrationality inevitably goes the irrationalists way(through being socially bound up or just flat out getting pushed over; ther Greeks were actually socially bound up; the Alexandrian library on the other hand was literally burned down by those who don't want to question and learn when their ideas are proven wrong) because it's easier than to learn mathematics, mathematics arises somewhere else for awhile till the irrationalists feel their freedom to bullshit is being infringed upon.  Anyways, what culture has been the most dominating mathematically since the Renaissance?  the French! Vieta, Pascal/Desarges, Descartes, Fermat, Lagrange, Laplace, Legendre, Monge, fourier, Cauchy, Galois, Hermite, Poncelet, Poincare, Andre Weil, Alain Connes, Deligne, Serre, Jean Bourgain, Laurent Lafforgue.  This list is not complete for sure. But, it's pretty good.

Other cultures have hard to argue against mathematicians; but, as a whole, the French have the current longest streak going!

This french domination(perhaps not by that much) is curious in the light of the sungods most archaeologicaly dug up in the 1800s.  As I've tried to point out in this blog, mythology and mathematics do share some common features - that of analogy.  Mathematics is well defined and constructive; poetry/mythology is purposely vague. Poetry and Mythology do have the distinction of perhaps serving a formative stage back in, well, pre-mathematics stages of mankind; curiously, the mythologists don't seem to want to stand down and not take it so seriously.  But, getting back to the French and sungods.  Naponean Bonaparte curiously spent a certain amount of time in Egypt.  Why?

The french also have the distinction of blowing the nose off the sphinx.  The French translated the rosetta stone and went around reading all the Egyptian tombs.  Recently, I've seen(I need to go and relook it up) that some French appear to have believed or speculated that Jesus Christ is remarkably analogous to sungods(this pre-1800s Napolean Bonaparte).  Was Napolean and the French in Egypt to confirm/deny this crazy idea that Jesus Christ is just various cultures sungods rolled up into one - one ring to rule them all?

The next question if true, is did they succeed?  Well, in my experience, one can read the original church fathers and find all kinds of oopsies like "Jesus Christ is a sungod" type of statements from the likes of Saint Augustine; but, one can argue(and christians do) that these are later statements that you can't take seriously.  Well, if you study Egyptian mythology enough, one can find mythological paralleles up the ante all B.C.  and then there's some curious statements from Herodotus(Greek historian who visited Egypt) about how the Egyptians 'personified' the twelve constellations.  Bottom line, one can show undisputably that the mythology of Jesus Christ goes back thousands of years before in Egypt for one.  Whether the French ever established conclusions or not I don't know.  Today, others have established and put all the evidence together.  We still can't say who made it all up(the Jesus Christ sungod anyways).  But, it doesn't matter imo.  If Jesus Christ was just a man and not a 'sun' of god; then so what! 

--------------------------------------------July 10, 2012 edit------------------------------------------------

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin-Fran%C3%A7ois_Chasseb%C5%93uf

Acharya references Comte De Voiney as perhaps the influence on Thomas Paine for his 'origin of freemasonry'(which I've made available on this blog not to far down from here).  I asked the question of where Thomas Paine get his ideas?  Now, that question can be pushed back even further; where does Mr De Voiney learn about sungods before the deciferment of the Rosetta Stone?

---------------------------------------------July 13, 2012 edit--------------------------------------------------

While the French have this great intellectual tradition, they also have their irrational side(just like all cultures; for instance the Greeks as I've pointed out before; they ran out the Pythagoreans because of their mathematics was scaring them; the Pythagoreans took Hypasus out to sea and drowned him for showing the irrationality of the square root of 2; and, see my gospel of truth to see the relation between Plato and Christianity). 

The French history is almost dominated by the reign of terror almost at the same time as America was putting in their democracy.  The French reacted remarkably different to the new idea of freedom of thought sweeping the American colonies.  They went on a rampage to kill all the intellectuals!  They beheaded, lots of them including Antoine Lavoisier Marie Antoinette.  When America took out the Iraqi government wrongly looking for Osama Bin Ladin, the Iraqi people went on an intellectuals killing spree.  They also went raiding the museums for every historic relic to hide and sell on the black market.  When the Nazies were loosing, Werner Von Braun and his band of engineers had to go into hiding because the Nazies wanted to kill them off so that nobody could get their knowledge. Examples can be multiplied of the vagueness gaming irrationalists, the anti-science religions that are jealous of the accomplishments of science throughout history; i've been writing much throughout this blog about this.  The evidence is clear. People go to anti-science religion because it is easy and they are jealous of real intellection.

astro picture for the day

Credit & Copyright: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT) & Giovanni Anselmi (Coelum Astronomia), Hawaiian Starlight

astro picture for teh day

Hubble Space Telescope image

astro picture for the day

Credit & Copyright: Máximo Ruiz

astro picture for the day

ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope image

this is a jet of gas from a young star just forming.

youtube for the day/ Peter Higgs gets to see his theory confirmed!

Not much more to say.  I grew up knowing that I was living during the electroweak unification period(confirmed experimentally at CERN in 1983-4).  There was also the great theory of Alan Guth of Inflationary theory confirmed by the COBE satellite around 1989.  We're also living in the accellerating universe era which is our own aether disproven scratch our head over that scientific discovery!(which I first read in Sky and Telescope around 1998). 

It's almost hard for most people to understand the great times we're living in.  We need to get people to understand true intellectual excitement; this is what this blog is for!  These guys have done real science - not mythology.

Peter Higgs and Fabiola Gianotti.  Fabiola is in charge of the Atlas detector(the Atlas actually works in concert with the cms making the technology doubly impressive!).

The picture on the right the signature of the Higgs particle.  The signature appears to be higgslike; We knew going in the Higgs theory could be many variants, and the Higgs could be higgslike with differences.  The LHC is of course now in the process of trying to get more data to find out more about the what this Higgs is like; which Higgs theory works.

Also, as I've remarked before, the discovery of the Higgs is much as the discovery of the planet Neptune.  Mathematicians and Astronomers had been collecting data and generalizing Newton's mathematics and astronomy in his Principia for a hundred years(from the likes of the Bernoulis, Leonard Euler, Lagrange, Laplace and others) till Laplace published his massive five volume almost thousand page each "Celestial Mechanics."  In studying and using these books, mathematicians had told astronomers that there's an anamoly in the motions of the outer gas giants; the likely explanation(because Newtonian mechanics was proven experimentally correct already) was that there's a planet beyond even Uranus(discovered in the 1700s by William Herschel; something else the Bible failed to mention; not just the americas).  Astronomer's eventually built telescopes of sufficient resolution power, pointed them at the time and place the mathematicians said so, and there it was! 

Similary, today's physicists have had an experimentally confirmed standard model for awhile now, and they've more or less known where to look(due to the then hard to confirm experimentally top quark); well, they built the machine(the lhc), powered it up(they actually confimed the electroweak theory and all physics discovered by particle accelerators before it to 'calibrate' the Lhc) searched around it just in case, but eventually, deciding to go ahead and tune it where they though it was; and, there it is!  This is a hugh scientific and technological achievement!

---------------------------------July 5th edit----------------------------------------------------

A good way of appreciating how significant a discovery of the Higgs is . . . before quantum mechanics and Special/General theory of relativity, scientific understanding was kind of 'normal'(there was the Maxwell work on light as electromagnetism which is a bit of a mindblower if you think about it; it's quite unexpected that light would have anything to do with electricity and magnetism; it's also still a bit of a mystery!).  The Newtonian world view was one of balistic balls richecheting off one another.  Perhaps another discovery a little bit before quantum mechanics and relativity theory was the electron.  It's a bit hard to imagine the affect of even the existence of atoms had on even physicists at the time.  But, an electron?  A 'sub'-atomic particle?

But, then came quantum mechanics and the relativity theories; now the world was scientifically weird.  General Relativity was to lead to neutron stars and black holes.  Quantum mechanics soon led to anti-matter, neutrinoes(particles that can go through lightyears of lead and not hit anything; they suggest that dark matter can work), quarks(fractional charges).  One should also mention quantum entanglement as a quantum weirdness phenomenon that is already being used technologically.  The Higgs particle is in this class of quantum weirdness particles.  Homo Erectus handling fire is treamendous accomplishment for biological life; so is flight in air or out into space.  All these new things from black holes to now the Higgs is as amazing as a species that can use fire and electricity. In fact, I've seen people noting that the higgs particle may one day lead to technological revolutions!

What's next?  Dark matter!  Hidden dimensions!

thought for the day/ Higgs has all but been announced(formaly)

I was wondering what I could find to post that would allow me to mention that the Higgs particle has all but been announced and discovered. I started thinking, "o.k. maybe a fun day post; i'll post some music; pink floyd was too obvious, so I started looking at Def Leppard "Woman" "Rock of Ages", "Satellite".  Well, somewhere in listening and looking for some fun music that is sortof related to science, I thought of it!  First I thought of the sounds of space(mostly planets).  Then, I recalled they did this for the lhc and even the Higgs particle!

The bottom LHC sounds is that of the simulated Higgs particle!

There's always an exciting science discovery announced on at least a weekly basis.  Sometimes an exciting science or technology is announced every day(at least it seems to me). This week looks to be pretty exciting.  There's a new nuclear powered nustar space telescope in orbit that looks to start imaging pretty quickly.  Russia's space radio interferometer has completed testing; so, it should be interesting to see how quickly news comes out of there.  And, a pretty big nanomanufacturing news item.

http://www.uwindsor.ca/dailynews/2012-06-15/chemists-break-new-ground-in-molecular-machine-research

I've heard of these rotaxane moleculars before.  They've talked about self-assembling them into larger mechanical complexes because they are unusually stable.  They've made molecular cars out of them.  The article linked above shows that by making a solid out of them, they can make gears and motors.  One can now make rows or gears and motors, put them on top of each other to drive each other and so on and so forth. The path to molecular machines looks to come faster now.

quote for the day

"nothing is the miracle is appears to be" - Simon Stevin