ScienceIQ.com

What's In A Name?

Hurricane Elena as seen from the space shuttle. Have you ever wondered how hurricanes get their names? For several hundred years many hurricanes in the West Indies were named after the particular saint's day on which the hurricane occurred. Experience shows that the use of short, distinctive given names in written as well as spoken communications ...

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HurricaneElena
Astronomy

Saturn: The Basics

To ancient astronomers, Saturn was a wandering light near the edge of the known universe. The planet and its rings have been objects of beauty and wonder ever since Galileo noticed the 'cup handles' ... Continue reading

SaturnTheBasics
Medicine

Your Friend, the Fat Cell

A healthy, adult human body contains about 35 billion fat cells. Each contains about 0.5 micrograms of fat. Stored fat is essential to good health. Fat is the body's principal energy reserve. It is ... Continue reading

FatCell
Astronomy

The Strange Spin of Uranus

Directional terms like north and south make sense here on Earth. The north and south axis of the Earth is relatively perpendicular to the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun. Actually, Earth's ... Continue reading

UranusSpin
Biology

Giant Cloned Monster Loose In Mediterranean Sea

Native Caulerpa taxifolia is found in and around the waters of Florida and the Caribbean. It is a smallish, yet hardy saltwater plant that grows rapidly and is ideal for use in aquariums with diverse ... Continue reading

Caulerpa

What Happens at the Edge of a Black Hole?

EdgeofaBlackHoleThe greatest extremes of gravity in the Universe today are the black holes formed at the centers of galaxies and by the collapse of stars. These invisible bodies can be studied by examining matter swirling into them, and by listening to the waves of distortion they make in spacetime. New data from X-ray satellites, such as NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, show signs of gas whizzing about black holes at close to the speed of light and hint that time is slowing as the gas plunges into the zone from which escape is impossible. Beyond Einstein missions will take a census of black holes in the Universe and give detailed pictures of what happens to space and time at the edges of these roiling vortices.

Beyond Einstein missions will listen to the sounds of spacetime carried by a new form of energy, predicted by Einstein, called gravitational waves. We will hear the booming, hissing, and humming of colliding and merging black holes and other extreme flows of matter throughout the Universe. These sounds will detail the conversion of matter and energy into warps in space and time. The measurements of gravitational waves will provide a new way of understanding the behavior of space and time near black holes and take us beyond to a new understanding of spacetime singularities.

Einstein himself never dreamed that it would be possible to detect these waves, which only vary the distance between objects as far apart as the Earth and Moon by less than the width of an atom. Yet the technology now exists to do so.