Tuesday, January 26, 2010

starsmoke droplets

Tiny interstellar-onion spaceships were filled with unlayered sheets of fresh-baked carbon atoms & delivered to our corner of the Milky Way.

This tasty tweet refers to recent laboratory study of micron-sized starsmoke spheres whose carbon atoms were cooked up in red giant stars across the early galaxy, condensed in those cool star atmospheres, and delivered to earth by primitive meteorites to be extracted by cosmochemists at U. Chicago and studied in labs of the midwest.

Many of your carbon atoms also arrived here in spaceships like this. Recent developments suggest a role for supercooled liquid carbon droplets in their process of formation.

Monday, January 25, 2010

closing the loop

it's easy for cats

Most metazoans buffer correlations directed in/out from skin and gene-pool boundaries. Worrying about idea-pool boundaries too is not easy, even for organisms as talented as us!

expensive sci-fi

The "jump to lightspeed" might empty your gas tank quick, given that >40 Olympic pools of powder are needed to make a 45 slug relativistic.

survival symmetry