2,000 Year Old Olive Tree Of Vouves

One Yowah nut, bisected

One of many opal mining sites in the red continent is called Yowah, and is famous for its opal nuts, veins of precious glowing opal within nodules of siliceous ironstone that often form amazing patterns. They vary from 0.5 to 20 cm across, and occur in an iron rich sandstone, near the border with an adjoining mudstone.

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Sir David Attenborough demonstrates the accuracy of the Mozambique Spitting Cobra’s venom streams by wearing a chemically treated visor that makes the venom turn purple on contact.

From Life in Cold Blood

Milo Manara - Storia dell’Umanità

Experience is the teacher of all things.

Julius Caesar (via perfectdiction-ary)

Astrophysicists detect ultra-fast winds near supermassive black hole

New research led by astrophysicists at York University has revealed the fastest winds ever seen at ultraviolet wavelengths near a supermassive black hole.      

“We’re talking wind speeds of 20 per cent the speed of light, which is more than 200 million kilometres an hour. That’s equivalent to a category 77 hurricane,” says Jesse Rogerson, who led the research as part of his PhD thesis in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York U. “And we have reason to believe that there are quasar winds that are even faster.”

Astronomers have known about the existence of quasar winds since the late 1960s. At least one in four quasars have them. Quasars are the discs of hot gas that form around supermassive black holes at the centre of massive galaxies - they are bigger than Earth’s orbit around the sun and hotter than the surface of the sun, generating enough light to be seen across the observable universe.

“Black holes can have a mass that is billions of times larger than the sun, mostly because they are messy eaters in a way, capturing any material that ventures too close,” says York University Associate Professor Patrick Hall, who is Rogerson’s supervisor. “But as matter spirals toward a black hole, some of it is blown away by the heat and light of the quasar. These are the winds that we are detecting.”

Rogerson and his team used data from a large survey of the sky known as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to identify new outflows from quasars. After spotting about 300 examples, they selected about 100 for further exploration, collecting data with the Gemini Observatory’s twin telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, in which Canada has a major share.

“We not only confirmed this fastest-ever ultraviolet wind, but also discovered a new wind in the same quasar moving more slowly, at only 140 million kilometres an hour,” says Hall. “We plan to keep watching this quasar to see what happens next.”

Much of this research is aimed at better understanding outflows from quasars and why they happen.

“Quasar winds play an important role in galaxy formation,” says Rogerson. “When galaxies form, these winds fling material outwards and deter the creation of stars. If such winds didn’t exist or were less powerful, we would see far more stars in big galaxies than we actually do.”

The team’s findings were published today in the print edition of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Cyanuric triazide or 2,4,6-triazido-1,3,5-triazine is white crystalline solid when pure and is an organic primary explosive with a detonation velocity of about 7,300 m·s-1. More than enough to remove a few fingers, so don’t even think about making it.

It is a quite interesting compound, since it only contains carbon and nitrogen, 3 carbon and 12 nitrogen in each molecule and 9 of these are in 3 azido groups. The compound is highly shock sensitive, it explodes while grind in a mortar. It has a sharp melting point a bit under 100 °C but it explodes upon heating above 200 °C giving nitrogen and elemental carbon as graphite and maybe some diamonds.

Since this compound is a highly sensitive energetic material I would recommend to do not try it out how this works. On the picture and the gif approx. 40-50 mg (0,04-0,05 g) cyanuric triazide was ignited. Even this small amount could be enough to cause serious damage, injury. 

Anyone want to read short reviews from energetic materials?

I remember first learning that you can cry from any emotion, that emotions are chemical levels in your brain and your body is constantly trying to maintain equilibrium. so if one emotion sky rockets, that chemical becomes flagged and signals the tear duct to open as an exit to release that emotion packaged neatly within a tear. Everything made sense after learning that. That sudden stability of your emotions after crying. How crying is often accompanied by the inability to feel any other emotion in that precise moment. And it is especially beautiful knowing that it is even possible to experience so much beauty or love or happiness that your body literally can’t hold on to all of it. So what I’ve learned is that crying signifies that you are feeling as much as humanely possible and that is living to the fullest extent. So keep feeling and cry often and as much as needed

How to get out stains using other things

How to read more. Here are books I’ve written. Here are of books I like.