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Check out the world's fastest animal (relative to its size): This research was featured at this year's Experimental Biology conference!
"One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range." -Victor Hugo A couple of weeks ago we took a look at the most distant galaxy (so far) in the known Universe, a galaxy so far away that it takes exclusively infrared observations from our most power space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer) in order to detect it. What's perhaps even more remarkable is that the light we do detect from it -- the light we detected in the infrared -- was actually emitted in the Ultraviolet part of the spectrum! Image credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Rychard…
“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” -Oscar Wilde Beyond the planet Earth, beyond all the stars in the night sky, and beyond the Milky Way galaxy, there's literally an entire Universe out there. Image credit: R. Jay GaBany, of http://cosmotography.com/. The farther away we're able to look, the more galaxies we're able to see. As far as our…
"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge." -Enrico Fermi As you probably know, the Large Hadron Collider -- site of discovery of the last fundamental particle in the Standard Model, the Higgs Boson -- is the most energetic particle accelerator in the history of humankind. When the upgrades it's currently undergoing are complete, it will reach collision energies of 14 TeV. Image credit: CERN / LHC, add-on created by http://www.panglosstech.com/. The way this happens is that protons are circulated in a giant ring, underground, that'…
  In honor of the Olympic games, Scientific American has put together a slide show of the fastest animals in the world, like the peregrine falcon shown in the picture above that has been recorded diving at speeds of 115 mph! The slide show is definitely a must-see! To check out the show, click here.  
There are plenty of examples in the music world where a cover of a song is strikingly different from the original and still interesting. Take the song You Spin Me Round, which cracked the top 5 all over Europe and North America when Dead or Alive released it. (Click for video.) 15 years later, Dope released a cover of the song in a completely different style, with an incredibly different feel. Take a listen: It's a pretty good cover. It's interesting to listen to, it's decidedly different from the original, and it's still instantly recognizable. But by time I get to the end of the…
Meseret Defar of Ethiopia ran 14:24.37 in Stockholm to break the women's 5000 meter indoor mark, lowering it by over 3 seconds. It is worth noting that this formidable run was performed on a track well short of the 200 meter indoor "standard" found in many colleges and universities, and thus displays tighter corners. Details here.