Physics education

While investigating the lunar surface, China's Chang'e 3 lander found another sort of moon shake, and figured out how to snap THOUSANDS of high-determination pictures of the moon.  Interestingly, you can take a look at the lunar surface more than ever because of the complex cameras found locally available the Chang'e 3, one of China's most progressive lunar landers. The Lunar Mission touched down on the moon in 2013, on the area known as Mare Imbrium – where scientists have faith in the inaccessible past, genuine water could have existed—making China the third nation in the historical backdrop of humankind to accomplish a delicate arriving on the lunar surface, after the Soviet Union and United States of America.  While the mission occurred in 2013, China's National Space Administration discharged a huge number of the top notch pictures amid 2015. The pictures in any case, weren't shown by western media because of the way that China is utilized to di

Experts have restored one of the largest known early maps of the world, and it's glorious, mythical creatures and all. The hand-drawn map was created 430 years ago by Urbano Monte. Centuries later, collector David Rumsey and his nephew have painstakingly scanned and digitally stitched together all 60 pages previously bound in an atlas, completing the map for the first time as it was originally intended. While little is known about the 16th-century cartographer who made it, the newly restored map gives insight into how people at the time understood the world. Created in 1587 in Milan, Italy, it shows the world in great detail, and was quite advanced for its day. The world as seen from above, looking down on the North Pole, was a perspective not commonly used by mapmakers at the time. Monte's depiction of Japan also shows a lot more place names than maps made by his contemporaries, likely because Monte met with Japanese delegations when they visited Milan in 1585,  David

Images have been revealed that show what it’s like in a body farm in Texas, where dead bodies are left to rot in cages. Found in San Marcos, researchers at the ranch receive corpses via donation, and then study how they decompose. Known as the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility (FARF), this 26-acre area has been operating since 2008. At the moment there are about 60 bodies there, left exposed outside. According to their  website , the FARF “is used by the forensic science community to gain knowledge about human decomposition and developing methods for determining the post mortem interval or time since death. “The FARF is also used to train forensic anthropology students, law enforcement, and medicolegal personnel in methods for searching and recovering human remains in a medicolegal context.” Once the bodies are removed from the FARF, they are then stored in the Texas State Donated Skeletal Collection. The remains here can then be used for scientific research in the f

Scientists using data from the Cassini spacecraft have discovered something unusual about the shadow cast on Saturn by its rings. Cassini was sent  crashing into Saturn  in September as its mission came to an end. However, in its final months, it dipped to between 2,600 and 4,000 kilometers (1,600 and 2,500 miles) above the planet to gather invaluable science. Research conducted by scientists in Sweden and the US, and published in  Science , looked at data from this period. And they found that the shadow of the ring, which Cassini flew through, was having a direct effect on the ionosphere of Saturn – its upper atmosphere. “The ionosphere is surprisingly variable and structured on small scales,” a short  statement  from the team read. “One reason for that is shadows cast by the rings, which block ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, thereby reducing the ionization in those regions.” On these passes, the Radio and Plasma Wave Science instrument on the spacecraft revealed that

Underwater archaeologists carrying out excavations in Lechaion, once upon a time the main harbor town of Ancient Corinth, have discovered some impressive examples of Roman engineering underneath the waves. The ancient city of Corinth, located on the Peloponnese peninsula of southern Greece, was once a strategic city of great power, placed as it was with easy access to the Mediterranean trade routes. It was famously destroyed by the Romans in 146 BCE, who laid the city to waste, and wouldn’t be rebuilt until a century later, by Julius Caesar no less. Danish and Greek archaeologists from the University of Copenhagen and Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities have been working on the  Lechaion Harbour Project  since 2013, and a have a five-year permit to explore the area, but this year has been notable for its breakthrough historic finds. “During the 2017 excavations, the first Roman-period harbor structures at Lechaion have come to light,” said project co-director Bjørn Lovén, from

A crocodile was found roaming the streets of Melbourne, Australia, late on Christmas Day. Since most of the continent separates the city from the reptile's natural habitat, there is absolutely no chance it got there on foot. Instead, the stray was probably a lost pet, illustrating how bad choices for household companions are posing a menace to the wider environment. When Melbourne police received a call that a 1-meter-long (3-foot) crocodile had been sighted at 8.30pm on Christmas Day on a suburban roadway, they probably thought someone had been hitting the celebratory sherry a little too hard. More tactfully, Acting Sergeant Daniel Elliott told  ABC News , “I thought it might have been a statue that had been placed there.” Other officers thought someone couldn't tell the difference between one of Australia's most powerful predators and an unusually large lizard. However, once prevailed upon to investigate, the police found what could not be mistaken for anything oth

Syria holds some of the world’s most incredible historical sites. Even with the civil war still raging in parts of the country, researchers have been busy discovering countless archeological gems. Now, archeologists  have stumbled upon  a network of military structures used for surveillance and communication during the Middle Bronze Age (2nd millennium BCE). Researchers used aerial surveillance and satellite images to discover the vast string of structures hiding in plain site in the arid lands of northern Syria. The research – a collaboration between the French National Center for Scientific Research, the University of Lyon in France, and the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums of Syria  – was published in the journal  Paléorient  this week. The 4,000-year-old network consists of a chain of fortresses, forts, towers, walls, and enclosures that were once linked up by large uncut basalt blocks and walls of several meters in width and height. The spatial organization

This weird yet amazing Cosmic Snake galaxy is actually behind a massive galaxy cluster called MACS J1206.2-0847, but thanks to the cluster’s gravity, we can see it directly from Earth. Light from the distant galaxy arrives at Earth, having been distorted by the gigantic gravitational influence of the intervening cluster. Fascinatingly, instead of making it more difficult to perceive cosmological objects, such strong lensing effects improve the resolution and depth of an image by magnifying the background object. Sometimes gravitational lensing can even produce multiple images of the object as light is bent in different directions around the foreground cluster.  Using Hubble, Dr. Antonio Cava of the Université de Genève and co-authors looked at several such images of the Cosmic Snake, each with a different level of magnification. “The amplified images are more precise, luminous, and allows us to observe details up to 100 times smaller,” Dr. Cava said.  The Hubble images re

This artist’s impression shows the red supergiant star Antares. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO. An international team of astronomers from Chile and Germany has managed to capture an image of unprecedented detail of another star — that isn’t the Sun — the red supergiant star Antares. The team has also made the first map of the velocities of material in the atmosphere of a star other than the Sun, revealing unexpected turbulence in the extended atmosphere of Antares. Antares, also designated Alpha Scorpii, is a well-studied, close red supergiant star at a distance of 554 light years. It is the fifteenth-brightest star in the night sky and the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius. With a diameter about 700 times that of the Sun and a mass about 12 times solar, Antares is one of largest stars. This is the most detailed image ever of the red supergiant star Antares, or any other star apart from the Sun. Image credit: K. Ohnaka / ESO. It is thought that Ant