ScienceIQ.com

Luminol; Trick-or-Treat or Terrible Feat

What does trick-or-treating and crime scene investigation have in common? Hopefully, they don't have much in common, unless the trick-or-treater is wearing a safety glow stick. Glow sticks contain luminol, a chemical substance used at crime scenes which glows when mixed with blood. When a crime is committed that involves blood spilling, luminol ...

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Luminol
Biology

Tea Time!

Did you know that a disease of coffee plantations made the British tea drinkers? In the 1700s Britain had many coffeehouses that served as popular social gathering places to discuss current events and ... Continue reading

TeaTime
Biology

Why Are Yawns Contagious?

Lots of animals yawn. It's a primitive reflex. Humans even begin to yawn before birth, starting about 11 weeks after conception. But contagious yawning doesn't start until about age 1 or 2. And even ... Continue reading

YawnsContagious
Astronomy

The Chandra Mission

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. Chandra is designed to observe ... Continue reading

Chandra
Geology

Glaciers: Rivers of Ice

Glaciers are massive sheets of ice that occur on every continent of the world except Australia. These giant ice slabs have a humble beginning, as the tiny snowflakes in winter precipitation that ... Continue reading

Glaciers

What is Dark Energy?

WhatisDarkEnergyBecause he originally thought the Universe was static, Einstein conjectured that even the emptiest possible space, devoid of matter and radiation, might still have a dark energy, which he called a 'Cosmological Constant.' When Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the Universe, Einstein rejected his own idea, calling it his greatest blunder. As Richard Feynman and others developed the quantum theory of matter, they realized that 'empty space' was full of temporary ('virtual') particles continually forming and destroying themselves. Physicists began to suspect that indeed the vacuum ought to have a dark form of energy, but they could not predict its magnitude.

Through recent measurements of the expansion of the Universe, astronomers have discovered that Einstein's 'blunder' was not a blunder: some form of dark energy does indeed appear to dominate the total mass-energy content of the Universe, and its weird repulsive gravity is pulling the Universe apart. We still do not know whether or how the highly accelerated expansion in the early Universe (inflation) and the current accelerated expansion (due to dark energy) are related.

A Beyond Einstein mission will measure the expansion accurately enough to learn whether this energy is a constant property of empty space (as Einstein conjectured), or whether it shows signs of the richer structure that is possible in modern unified theories of the forces of nature.