This picture is something we have never seen before. It is the further and best way of showing how big space is. This picture was taken by using the NASA Hubble Telescope.  This picture is so big that it takes 4.3 GB of disk space. It is 1.5 billion pixels, and it was created by taking 411 images of the Andromeda galaxy, which is the nearest galaxy to ours.

NASA’s Hubble Telescope

The interesting thing about this photo is that you really get a deep look into the millions of stars. From a far glance of the photo you can clearly see plenty of stars with a good amount of black around them. But as you zoom in closer and closer into the black area you start seeing stars that you didn’t originally see. And the more you zoom in the more you realize that it is not black at all, but the closer you get the more tiny stars you see. It is really amazing they way they did this, and it is the best visual example to show how unimaginably big space is.

Watching this video makes you feel very very small. It is helping us move towards the understanding of how small Earth really is. This video takes you through over 100 million stars, and glances over 40,000 light years worth of stars.

Ducks have evolved a skill to stay away from predators that is pretty cool. Everything needs sleep, and if your not a rat or a bird that can easily isolate itself from predators, then your a duck or just a normal land animal that needs a way to not get eaten at night. And ways have obviously evolved for these animals to stay safe over time.

For a duck, that safety comes from sleeping in a group of ducks. When the ducks fall asleep the fall asleep in a group, or a line. Where the middle ducks get a normal nights rest. But for the ducks on the outside, they do something different. The ducks use something called “Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep”. This is where the duck allows half of its brain to sleep, and the other half to stay fully asleep.

The half of the brain that is awake has the full activity of an awake bird, which allows it to sleep with one eye open. Researchers tested this by having four ducks in a tank. And as they rotated the outside ducks with the inside ducks of the line they were able to switch roles. Where the birds on the outside were able to fall fully asleep, and the bird that was on the inside but now on the outside was about to turn half of its brain on to be aware of any approaching predators. When the researches threw a test predator at them, the birds were able to react with in a fifth of a second.

I would like to look more into how animals have evolved to be able to get their sleep and be safe at the same time. Its not a topic that is really noticed, but it really is a really cool thing to look into, thinking about the thousands of years that skill took to develop and evolve, its really quit amazing. I will definitely try to get another blog on a cool sleep technique, and with that I would like to leave of with a #STAYCURIOUS

Humans used to think any living thing couldn’t live without light. But little did we  were far wrong. The ocean contains 99 percent of the living space on our planet. And in that 99 percent, 95 percent of it remains unexplored. The reason why the ocean remains so unexplored is because of the water pressure. The record for the furthest a scuba diver has made it is 332 meters. To put in perspective the height of the Empire State Building is 443 meters. Around 535 meters, the water pressure is starting to become pretty intense. It would have the equivalent pressure of a polar bear standing on a quarter.

Around 1000 meters you reach the twilight zone. After this point light ceases to exist and it becomes pitch black. The water pressure here would be about the same as standing on the surface of the planet Venus. Around 1,828 meters we would reach the deepest point of the grand canyon.

When you reach 2,000 meters is when you would start to see lifeforms that are very different from what we are used to. And also life that is living with no light. This fish is only visible if light is shined onto it, as it reflects from its surrounding, and since it is pitch black, all you can see is its eyes.

As we reach the Abyssal zone at 4,000 meters, water pressure reaches to 11,000 pounds per square inch. These depths are home to alien like creatures, like the more famous fish, the angler fish.

Around 4,267 Meters is the average depth of the ocean where you would expect to hit the floor, but parts of the ocean goes way deeper than this. At 6,000 meters you reach the Hadal Zone. Water preacher is here is 1,100 times what we experience on land. It would be like carrying 50 Boeing 747 jumbo jets. You would be crushed in a second.  When you reach 8,848 meters you would reach the height of mount everest if it was upside down and under water.

The furthest a human has reached in the ocean was by Don Walsh in his submarine in 1960, at a depth of 10,916 meters. A window eventually cracked which forced them to resurface, which would take about 5 hours. At 10,972 we reach the average heigh of an airplane flight. So if you ever looked out the window of a flight you can get a good perspective for how deep that is.

Finally at 10,994 meters we have hit the deepest known ocean. But we are almost certain that the ocean goes even deeper than this, but has yet to be discovered. We estimate that only 5% of the ocean floor is accurately mapped. So you can’t imagine the crazy wildlife there is down there. The deep ocean is such a mysterious thing, where we find such mysterious creatures with such amazing ways of living life. Animals come up with unique ways to attract prey, or stay away from predators.

More than ever scientists are challenging these harsh conditions by coming up with technology allow us to explore. But it will take a very long time until we begin to even understand the ocean and the billions of creatures that live in it. I am willing to bet we could find dozens of living dinosaurs in the deep depths of the deep ocean.

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The Moon of Earth is a definitely a special moon. It is layered with thick layers of dust. The Apollo astronauts found it difficult to operate on this sticky dust surface. The dust was created by micro-meteorites colliding to the surface. The dust particles are just constantly grinding each other up for 4 billion years now.

The Apollo astronauts helped prove a theory, that Charles Darwin’s son hypothesized in 1878, that the moon is moving away from the Earth. The astronauts put a mirror on the moon, and astranomers shined a laser at it and measured the length of the laser. They found out that indeed the moon is moving away by about 3.5 cm per year.

The distance from the Earth to the Moon is 234,000 miles. It is locked in a phase lock with the gravity from earth, which means from earth we only see side of the moon. With the moon being 1/4 the size of the Earth it being in a phase lock changes the day to day ratio of moon to Earth. If you’re on the moon for one day,  27 earth days will have passed.

If you look up to the moon you’ll notice a face on it or, the man on the moon. It looks like theres a face on the moon. That was created by astroids railing into the moon creating craters that are 700 miles across. The larger craters were filled with lava which mad it darker than the rest of the moon. This big dips in the moon are called maria, which in latin translates to seas.

The moon exists in the vacuum of space, due to having no atmosphere. So the sky is always dark, because there no molecules to spread the sun’s light. Heat doesn’t stay as consistent in the darkness of space. As the moons temperatures can vary from 240 degrees F, and get to -240 F.

With the moon being one of the bigger moons we know about relative to the object it is orbiting it creates changes on the Earth. It has a gravitational effect on Earth, it changes the tides of our ocean. Tides are pulled back and forward, the tide goes towards the moon, so in result the opposite side of the ocean drys up. If you really think about this it is a crazy thing. With the mass of the ocean being as big as it is, that the moon can change position of the entire body. In some instances the difference is 55 feet.

The moon keeps the Earth in check. It is keeping the Earth tilt where it is supposed to be, which allows us to have our normal season. If we had a smaller moon this would not be a thing.

Have you ever looked up and thought the moon and sun looked the same size. I have but I never really looked into it. Well it turns out it is one of the craziest coincidence I have ever heard. So the reason they appear the same size is because the sun is 400 times the Moon’s diameter, and it is also 400 times apart from each other, which makes it a perfect fit for solar eclipses.

I have such a new outlook on the moon. Now noticing facts that I overlooked as a kid really turns out to be so interesting. And that really could be a lesson to not overlook little things, and look into things we take advantage of, and many to

#StayCurious

Parrots are a bird that everyone has heard about. But a bird that I think is overlooked for its amazing ability to repeat back the sound waves it hears. It has a talent that is not to be matched by any other living organism we know about. And the science behind how this bird, with a brain much smaller than ours, can pull off this amazing feature.

We can thank evolution for this being possible. Scientists acknowledge that the parrot is one of the most understudied field. We are still trying to  find out new things about the parrot and how it brains allows it to perform its purpose in nature .

The evolution of the parrot can date all the way back to 29 million years ago. Obviously 29 million years ago there wasn’t a bird that looked or acted like the bird we see today. But we can see the shell of its skull has evolved and has been around for quite some time. And what is inside the brain is what makes this bird special.

Evolution a big overlook of thousands of years of natural selection. Where the one that is rightly fit to survive in its environment will survive. Which is what makes these species unique. We see tons of animals in the same animal family that are different due to natural selection. And this bird and how its brain evolved is the best example to show this method. Scientists say the reason their brain survived and grew under revolution is because it allows the birds to communicate in the wild with each other by repeating each other for mating reasons, to mark territory, and pass along alarms between each other.

The most recent explanation from scientists on how these birds did this through evolution is by the split of its brain into duplicates of itself. Their “song nuclei “in their brain is the name for the part of the brain in the mimic bird. The parts in this brain has neurons that are inter dependent that allows them to learn quickly, process, and then mimic the sound that it hears. But the exact area in the brain that this process happens is still remained a mystery under scientific research. We see differences in the brain but it is still not confirmed how it works. But what scientists have noticed that there is a gene that is found often in songbirds that is found in the splitting of the brain.

Parrots have a similar brain and gene structure, called the “core”,to the hummingbird, but the “shell” of the parrot is unique. I hope through technology in the future we will be able to find more out about these birds, and how the flow of their special brain they contain. In a couple of months from now we will find out something significant things about how the brain works in this bird, as some scientific research is being more intensely studied to find out about a bird everyone assumes they know, but no one knows about it and how it performs.

In my last post I made a statement that aliens will be real due to humans traveling and living on another planet. And in this post I’ll make an argument to why I think aliens totally are real already.

Space is the most fascinating thing ever. Something we as a race cannot rap our minds around. And we can prove this by the thousands of questions almost everyone has. How big is Space? Does it ever end? Are there other living things out there? If yes, what do they look like? These are questions I don’t know if we will ever find out. But I have a good argument to answer the question: Are there aliens?

Think about how big space is. I don’t think anyone can fully grasp this idea until you make a trip to Alaska or somewhere where you can see stars the clearest. But even if you just look up and see stars, you still can get a pretty good idea that it is huge. Space is where you can find another dimension, a place where it defies gravity, and allows you to go back in time. There are planets that if you were to visit it for 7 minutes, and come back to earth, 7 years would of passed. Because of gravity and the orbit it takes, it changes time.

If you were to look up at the sky right now and see a star, that does not mean that star is still in existence. Space is so big that light travels slowly through it, which is why we humans measure distance in space in lightyears. And that star you are looking at could have exploded millions and millions of years ago. Possibly even before dinosaurs were alive. But the light of the planet is just now reaching earth for our eyes to see. That just helps you put in perspective how big space is.

All of the stars we see are suns, and suns have planets orbiting around them. And if you were to see the stars in Alaska, you would be able to see millions of stars, or suns. Thinking about that, and how small earth is compared to everything else that exists, it is hard to say that you think earth is the only plannet with a living thing on it. I am even talking about bacteria, if you found bacteria on another planet, that is an alien, it is a living thing. So out of the billions of stars out there, there is bound to be aliens.

Scientists put the number of stars that we can physically observe with our level of technology right now at 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. And we humans love to play the odds game. And if you are saying that that Earth is the only planet with a living thing at the odds of 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, that is just a game of odds that I don’t think will go in your favor. Scientists just recently found 7 “Earthlike” planets only 39 lightyears away from earth. To us that is extremely far, but in the scale of the galaxy that makes this solar system our neighbor.

So I just want you to be open to that argument that aliens are existent, and allow your mind to stay open and stay curious, for Earth is just a grain of sand in the all of the beaches on earth combined and more!

So last night I was walking home from a prior commitment and was amazed when I look up at the stars. It mainly was amazing in the western part of the sky. There were stars everywhere, the thing that caught my attention the most was you could easily see Mars. Now this time around seeing Mars was different. You could clearly see it shinning brighter than others and you could see a little bit of the red around the bright twinkle. So in that case I am going to write about Mars and the organization that is preparing to create a human civilization there by the year 2032 .

Mars One is a mission to habitat the first humans on Mars. Crews will be assembled by applicants who apply online. Those applicants will be slimmed down to a select few. They will go through training to learn the skills care for themselves on this planet that is 249 miles from earth. Once these applicants reach Mars they are stuck there forever. The Mars One organization will be sending rovers and cargo missions through the years 2026-2029. These missions will prepare the habitat that the humans will be settling in the year 2032.

The outpost the humans will be living in.

When I found out about this mission, and that it is actually in the works of becoming reality, I was just so amazed and happy. Amazed in the fact that in this era of technology will allow us to live on another planet, and happy that I am alive for this huge step in the human race. This is something all of us have thought about, but never thought we would live to see the day. It amazes me that we are going to have humans living on another planet before we even know what the dark side of the moon is like.

I am going to reference the same movie that I did in my last post, Interstellar. To think that we are getting closer to the reality that this movie portrays of going to different planet is just amazing. I mean who knows what we will be doing in space within the next 100 years. Another thing that excites me is that the debate if aliens are real or not will be over. A basic definition of an alien is a living thing that is not living on earth. And even though they are humans, they are living on another planet. So they are technically aliens,  experiencing an environment a human has never experienced before.  The things we will find out through science when this happens will be such a huge step.

We are blessed to be able to experience such an event in the works, and if this doesn’t excite you then I don’t know what will! And if I want you to take anything from this post, it is to stay curious, and open to anything, because anything is possible. Especially in an era that is getting smarter and smarter exponentially. I would say this is the best generation, because we as a race are finding out how to use more and more of our brain, and you can see that through the technology we are creating!

Saturn’s F ring

From a far view Saturn’s F ring looks as one, but as you look closer there are multiple strands made up of material that was knocked off with interactions with a small moon. There are four strands, one strand being vary faint and hard to see.

These strands are famous for a bed it has on its strands. When looked at in some detail, you see around the planet the ring has spiral. Astronomers have a hard time catagorizing this ring because it is very disrupted and dense.  

It is the smaller rings to see as the width is only 30-500 km, compared to the next smaller right called the Pauline Ring which is 2500 km in width. The F ring is on the very outside of all the rings. Astronomers were unaware of this ring until 1979 when Voyagers 1 closest orbit. In this orbit we discovered about the F ring and the G ring. What is thought to be in the F ring is 13 type of particles with a size of 10 km on average. They are mostly ice boulders and degree from other objects blasting each other creating thousands of particles In the photo above you can barley see the F ring on the very outside. because of it being so outside it the most active ring. The shape of it changes within hours of each other. There is a main strand to the F ring, and the surround 3 strands are spiral. It receives material from the moon making it a new type of ring every time we get a glimpse of it.

This video is the closest we can get to understanding a black and what it would look like if we ever got pulled into one. It goes through how gravity changes time and takes into a dimension that will simply blow your mind away. From explaining how a black hole will bend light because the gravity is so strong, to explaining how you would be able to see the back of your head, all the way to being able to go back to even the dinosaur age, this video will explain how its all possible.

A black hole defined as a spot in space having such a strong gravitational field that nothing can escape from it, even light. There is no answer to what the inside of a black hole looks like, but space agencies are constantly getting new ideas of what it looks like. If you are being pulled into a black hole, you no longer exsist, or have the free will to do anything. You are simply just an observer. You would see beautiful galaxies getting tossed around, with a black circle which is the black hole. It is defined by the light around it. As you get closer to your doom, you enter the photons sphere, which forces your photons are forced to travel in orbits, after the orbit, your body eventually comes back to your eyes. It is hard to think how that is possible but through this phase and your body splitting through the orbit you are able to see the back of your head.

As you get closer and closer to the black hole, space will get more distorted, to a point where everything is black. Except behind you it would be as if you were looking outside a circular window to the universe. You are traveling at a small fraction of the speed of light. The faster you are traveling through space, causes you to move slower in time. At this point in the black hole, time is moving so slowly that you are in a dimension where you can see anything that has ever gone through the black hole. The objects you are looking at are going through  faster time dilation. This allows you to see the entire history of a spot in the universe. So for instance we would be able to see dinosaurs on earth

That part does not last for long as you keep traveling on. As the light behind you gets blue shifted, which is a decrease in wavelength and it reflects what you are seeing back, you become invisible and frequency is increasing and your eyes will eventually be permanently blind. Matter is being stretched kills every property of atoms. At this point time is no longer a part of any timeline to the outside universe, nothing occurs.

Blue shifting

That is the closest description scientists have come up with. Black holes and space in general are such a mystery, a mystery that a human brain will never understand. I am just so fascinated in how gravity can change time, and if you want to see a movie that plays with that concept, then I suggest you watch Interstellar. It is a movie that shows how being on different planets creates its own time schedule through gravity from the rest of the outside world.