Both physicist Brian Greene and neurologist Oliver Sacks explain the very strange, very subjective nature of time.
The elasticity of experience is expressed by sound artist Ben Rubin in a piece he produced for The Next Big Thing. We include an excerpt on being in “the zone.” His story features track stars: Shawn Crawford, Amy Acuff, Brendon Couts, Jason Pyrah, Derrek Atkins, Jon Drummond, and Larry Wade.
The Solstices mark the time of year when the Sun is rising and setting as far south (Winter Solstice) or as far North as possible before changing direction. When the Sun rises at its southern extreme in the Northern Hemisphere we have Winter Solstice. When the Sun rises at its northern extreme we have Summer Solstice.
The Sun at the Winter Solstice reaches an ending or death, dying to the previous yearly cycle. The Winter Solstice is marked by the longest night of the year, the shortest day. This time marks the beginning when the days slowly begin to lengthen and the nights slowly grow shorter.
The Sun at Sumer Solstice is reaching a point of fullness or the mid-point of the Solar Cycle. The Summer Solstice marks the longest day and the shortest night of the year and the turning point where the days slowly begin to shorten and the nights slowly begin to lengthen.
In the bigger picture, we are also ending a Great Year that has lasted nearly 26,000 years. That means this is time when we are witness to a new beginning of an entirely new 26,000 year cycle. The ending and beginning of a Great Year occurs over many years. We propose in Shamanic Astrology that it lasts at least 144 years as the processional cycle moves one degree every 72 years and these points are on at least some part of the Galactic Cross (the intersection of the plane of the Solar System with the plane of the Galaxy) for 72 years before and 72 years after the exact alignment.
Heron Island lagoon. Image downloaded from Google Earth 13 Oct. 2010. Image date 2 Aug. 2006. Credit: 2011 DigitalGlobe
(PhysOrg.com) — While most of us could find no better use for Google Earth than checking out a holiday destination, scientists in Sydney have shown it can reveal a lot about the behaviour of marine life on the Great Barrier Reef.
In what is believed to be the first research of its kind, University of Technology, Sydney marine biologist Dr Elizabeth Madin and colleagues – including Dr. Joshua Madin of Macquarie University and Professor David Booth from UTS – have usedGoogle Earth satellite images to observe the indirect effects of behavioural interactions between predators and prey in the lagoon habitat at Heron Island.
The results, published in the paper “Landscape of fear visible from space” in the first issue of the journal Nature Scientific Reports, have revealed distinct patterns of grazing halos – rings of bare sand devoid of seaweed – within the algal beds surrounding isolated groups of coral.
he researchers, led by Prof. Xiang Zhang at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have published their study in a recent issue of Nano Letters.
As the researchers explain, most previous invisibility cloaks have used metallic metamaterials for cloaking at microwave frequencies. But at optical frequencies, the metal absorbs too much light and leads to significant metallic loss, and Berkeley and other groups have had to design dielectric cloaks at infrared frequencies. More recently, researchers at University of Birmingham (UK) have experimented with using uniaxial crystals as the cloak material, which can enable cloaking in visible frequencies, but only for a certain polarization of light.
(a) 171 Ĺ image showing the funnel and loop in which fast waves propagate. (b) 1600 Ĺ image showing flare ribbons. (c) 171 Ĺ base difference image showing dimming behind the CME front. The four brackets mark the smaller FOV of the other panels. (d)-(f ) 171 Ĺ running difference images showing successive wave fronts propagating in the funnel. The three curved cuts are used to obtain space-time diagrams shown in Fig. 2. The square box marks the region for Fourier analysis in Fig.4. (g)-(i) Images of (d)-(f ) in the boxed region Fourier filtered with a narrow Gaussian centered at the peak in Fig. 4(b) at frequency ν = 14.5 mHz (P = 69 s) and wave number k = 9.0 × 10-3 Mm -1 (λ = 110 Mm), which highlight the corresponding fast wave trains.
(PhysOrg.com) — Scientists using the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument on board NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), have detected quasi-periodic waves in the low solar corona that travel at speeds as high as 2,000 kilometers per second (4.5 million miles per hour). These observations provide, for the first time, unambiguous evidence of propagating fast mode magnetosonic waves at such high speeds in the Sun’s low atmosphere
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
The recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland upset airline bosses and caused a lot of fuss, but they were trivial by comparison with what could happen next, according to Clive Oppenheimer’s new book.
If you thought the Icelandic volcano was bad – think again. According to a new study, the recent ash clouds that grounded aircraft and marooned holiday-makers were “just a taste” of the widespread air pollution, public health problems and agricultural crises that future, bigger eruptions could bring.
These are just a few of the conclusions of what, rather ironically, claims to be a “non-catastrophist” new book by the University of Cambridge volcanologist, Dr. Clive Oppenheimer, entitled Eruptions That Shook The World and published by Cambridge University Press.
Longest Total Lunar Eclipse in 11 Years Occurs Wednesday
SPACE.com Staff
Date: 13 June 2011 Time: 07:33 AM ET
A total lunar eclipse is seen as the full moon is shadowed by the Earth on the arrival of the winter solstice, Tuesday, December 21, 2010 in Arlington, VA. From beginning to end, the eclipse lasted about three hours and twenty-eight minutes.
CREDIT: NASA/Bill Ingalls
The longest total lunar eclipse since July 2000 will occur on Wednesday (June 15), with skywatchers in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia in prime position to witness the moon treat.
The event is the first lunar eclipse of 2011 and one of two total lunar eclipses this year. The eclipse, which will occur during June’s full moon, will begin at 1:24 p.m. EDT (1724 GMT) and last until 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT), but it will not be visible from North America.
For observers in regions where it will be visible, the eclipse could offer an amazing sight: the period of totality will be 100 minutes. In the last 100 years, only three other eclipses have rivaled the duration of totality of this eclipse, according to SPACE.com’s skywatching columnist Joe. Rao. The last lunar eclipse of similar length occured on July 16, 2000 and lasted 107 minutes.
Sun’s Fading Spots Signal Big Drop in Solar Activity
by Denise Chow, SPACE.com Staff Writer
Date: 14 June 2011 Time: 03:50 PM ET
Some unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles, could be indications that our sun is preparing to be less active in the coming years.
The results of three separate studies seem to show that even as the current sunspot cycle swells toward the solar maximum, the sun could be heading into a more-dormant period, with activity during the next 11-year sunspot cycle greatly reduced or even eliminated.
(TheWeatherSpace.com) — It has been a colder than average June across the Southwestern United States and this is leaving me to believe the year will be more severe in terms of the intensity of thunderstorms in the Southwestern United States, from large hail, damaging winds, and tornadoes.
There is a hint of hope that the season will start through Arizona and Mexico by the end of this month as the Four Corner High Pressure system develops, however a persistent trough in the Pacific will keep much of the ridge from fully forming.
