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A cosmic ray detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has just been installed on the International Space Station.  Cosmic rays are really cool even though most people don’t have a clue what they are.  What are they?  They are basically extremely high energy particles that have been accelerated to very high energies through interactions somewhere in…

I always suspected that there was something like this lying behind the motivation of the US, Russia, and the UK to ban open-air nuclear tests starting in 1963. To think that humans did such stupid things blindly such as blowing up atomic weapons, which spread all kinds of nasty radioactive fallout, is just hard to…

I’m still reading this book about the history of spices and the spice trade.  The book presents cumulative information from sources dating far back to ancient times relating to spices and their trade.  With almost every section on a different spice, it seems like it unlocks entire worlds. The most recent world I am reading…

A light year is very, very far.  About 10 trillion kilometers.  46 nanometers is extremely short. On October 15, 1991 a particle detector operated by the University of Utah detected an extremely unusual event: a cosmic ray particle traveling at close to the speed of light.  This was a particle of matter, not a form…

Researchers at the Fermilab Tevatron collider have conducted proton collision experiments in which the parity between matter and antimatter is violated, slightly in favor of matter.  During the formation of the Universe after the Big Bang, an as yet unknown process led to baryogenesis – the creation of baryonic matter which forms the basis of…

Geological researchers have located a mantle reservoir based on the atypical ratio of the isotopes helium-3 to helium-4 in rocks found on an island in the canadian arctic.  Most helium-3 in Earth rocks has been outgassed over billions of years as the primitive Earth mantle that formed from space rocks got churned through volcanic processes. …

This cool site has a calculator which can compute your Body Mass Index (BMI) and Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) based on your height and weight.  Based on your amount of activity, it can then calculate the optimum amount of daily caloric intake for you.  Consuming below that amount of daily caloric intake means your diet…

Many people are not aware of mail client programs such as Thunderbird.  There used to be a time before the advent of the popular web-based e-mail systems such as gmail and yahoo mail when the only way to access e-mail was with an e-mail client program like Thuderbird.  Now, many people only know about webmail…

A story is in the news today about the European Southern Observatory (ESO) having discovered a star that is 260 times as massive as the Sun, exceeding what was thought to have been the maximum size limit of 150 solar masses for stars.  It is the largest star ever observed.  Accompanying the article is this…

Cygwin, sshd and Windows 7