about a girl.

Yes, it is already Monday on this side of the world. I absolutely abhor Mondays. I have to get up in five hours, and I haven’t even gone to bed yet.

Like life on Earth, galaxies can “eat” each other and evolve over time. The Milky Way’s neighbor, Andromeda, is currently dining on one of its satellites. More than a dozen star clusters are scattered throughout Andromeda, the cosmic remains of past meals. The image above is from a simulation of Andromeda and our galaxy colliding, an event that will take place in about 3 billion years.

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The particles making up normal matter have opposite versions of themselves called antimatter. An electron has a negative charge, for example, but its antimatter equivalent, the positron, is positive. Matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they collide and their mass is converted into pure energy by Einstein’s equation e=mc². Some futuristic spacecraft designs incorporate antimatter engines.

Antimatter cannot be stored in a container made of ordinary matter because antimatter reacts with any matter it touches, annihilating itself and the container. Antimatter that is composed of charged particles can be contained by a combination of an electric field and a magnetic field in a device known as a Penning trap. This device cannot, however, contain antimatter that consists of uncharged particles, for which atomic traps are used.

Antimatter is said to be the most costly substance in existence, with an estimated cost of $25 billion per gram for positrons, and $62.5 trillion per gram for antihydrogen. This is because production is difficult (only a few antiprotons are produced in reactions in particle accelerators), and because there is higher demand for the other uses of particle accelerators. According to CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), it has cost a few hundred million Swiss Francs to produce about 1 billionth of a gram (the amount used so far for particle/antiparticle collisions).

On 16 July 1969, a United States law was passed called the “Extra-Terrestrial Exposure Law” that made it illegal for the public to come in contact with extra-terrestrials or their vehicles. (Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations). Anyone found guilty of such contact could face up to one year imprisonment as well as a fine of $5000. Also, any individual who had been “exposed” could be quarantined under armed guard by the NASA administrator without a hearing.

The law was passed originally to protect Earth from possible biological contamination resulting from the US Apollo Space Program and other space exploration programs. It has been suggested by researchers and scientists that the U.S. government was very concerned that contact with extra-terrestrial bacteria could result in a worldwide plague. The immune system of human beings wouldn’t be able to fight off extra-terrestrial bacteria, so therefore any kind of “extra-terrestrial exposure” was taken very seriously.

People in the UFO community especially were alarmed with the law because its broad definitions could allow the US government to prosecute people in NASA as well as individuals of the general public who come into contact with extra-terrestrials and their vehicles.

photoholic:

C is for Cookie.. (via Danimator)

I can haz?

In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall of Haverhill, MA placed six terminal patients on a specially designed bed built on a scale and weighed them as they took their last breath. Based on results from the experiment, the patients lost approximately 3/4 ounces which equals 21.3 grams. MacDougall also measured fifteen dogs in similar circumstances and reported the results as negative with no perceived change in weight. He took these results as confirmation that the human soul has weight and that dogs do not have souls. MacDougall’s experiments were published in the New York Times and some medical journals.

Interesting Fact: These experiments inspired a film called “21 Grams” starring Sean Penn.

David Allen Kirwan attempted to rescue a friend’s dog after it fell into Celestine Pool, a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park on July 20, 1981. Despite numerous shouts from bystanders, Kirwan dove headfirst into the pool but was unable to save the dog. After managing to swim back to shore, he was helped out of pool, where his injuries became apparent – the exposure to the 200°F (93°C) water of the hot spring resulted in third-degree burns to 100% of his body and had also blinded him. After being led to the sidewalk, Kirwan reportedly stated: “That was stupid. How bad am I? That was a stupid thing I did.” When one of Kirwan’s shoes was removed, all of the skin came off with it. He died the next day at a Salt Lake City hospital. Although there have been at least 19 deaths due to scalding at the Yellowstone, this was the only known case where someone died after deliberately jumping into one of the park’s hot springs.

fromme-toyou:

Portland, Maine

How amazing this house was with it’s 3rd floor 360 degree view, balconies, wrap around back porch and brick walk ways. It reminded me of the house in Great Expectations.

Oh, wow.

fuckyeahtwilight: via fuckyeahinsanetyra

I’m paying Smart Bro internet P990 a month for THIS.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

My favorite so far.

day-breaking: (via littleteaspoon)

unchainedmelody:

feel like you are suffocating?

like, if you don’t do something, or go somewhere, if you don’t get out, you’ll go crazy?

This happens to me more than I’d like to admit. I’m restless, I hate staying in one place, I hate how everything seems to be so normal and routine and mundane…. its not a feeling I like, but I don’t know how to get rid of it.

Maybe I have to move? Maybe I need to lose weight? or do something daring… Maybe I need to shake up my world a little bit, do something out of character, because I feel like if I don’t I might just completely, and utterly lose it.

This pretty much describes my daily life.

The Basilica del Pilar in Zaragoza, Spain is dedicated to Our Lady of the Pillar, the patron saint of Spain, who is said to have appeared to St. James in the 40 AD and gave him a small wooden statue and a column of jasper and instructed him to build a church in her honor. The statue atop the pillar is present in the church to this day. Amazingly, during the Spanish Civil War, three bombs were dropped on the church, none of which exploded. The architecture is of baroque style, and the present building was predominantly built between 1681 and 1872.

Myth: Einstein failed math at school.

This is a surprisingly old error which everyone seems to believe. Its origins seem to be a 1935 article in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Magazine in which the myth first appears in print under the heading “Greatest Living Mathematician Failed in Mathematics.” Many failing students probably take heart in the myth thinking that there may be hope for them if Einstein could flunk math and still become a genius, but unfortunately for them, Einstein showed genius from a very young age – including in the field of mathematics. When he was shown the article from the magazine, Einstein laughed and said, “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”

Interesting Fact: In 1905, during his spare time, Einstein produced four papers that upended physics. The first showed that light could be conceived as particles as well as waves. The second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the special theory of relativity, said that there was no such thing as absolute time or space. And the fourth noted an equivalence between energy and mass described by the most famous equation in all of physics, E=mc² .

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