Saturday, October 2
Friday, October 1
Cleaning Coffee Mugs
While these stains don’t come out with regular hand-washing or stints in the dishwasher, there are a few different things you can do lift them. Which one is best and easiest? I was determined to find out! So I tried five different methods and recorded my results. Here are my findings.
How I Tested the Methods for Cleaning Coffee Stains Inside Mugs
I rooted around in the cabinet and found my five favorite mugs, which, with near-constant use, also happened to be the most stained. I brewed a strong batch of coffee and poured about two ounces of liquid in the bottom of each one. Then, I let it all sit on the counter to soak in. Once the liquid had evaporated and the coffee oils had left a nice, tough layer on top of the already-lingering stains, it was time to get to work by cleaning each one using five popular and proven methods!
The ratings: I ranked each stain-removal approach from 1 to 5, with 5 being the easiest and/or most efficient and 1 being the hardest and/or least efficient. While each technique and tool managed to leave the mugs clean, some required more work either during or after the job was done. Along with the rating, you’ll find more detailed notes from my tests. READ MORE...
Neanderthal Man
What almost everybody instantly recognizes is that this man, nicknamed “Krijn,” who was not even a Homo sapiens, has a magnetic personality that still radiates over the millennia.
As Live Science reports, experts from Kennis & Kennis Reconstructions created the face of the young Neanderthal man from a piece of skull discovered from the North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands twenty years ago.
Face of Neanderthal charms the world
Using what they already knew from the Neanderthals’ sturdy bone structure, the researchers also gleaned information from other skulls that have been found and data regarding their eye, skin, and hair color to help in the recreation of the Neanderthal’s grinning face.
Believed to have lived in Doggerland, which was once dry land but now forms the seabed in the North Sea between the United Kingdom and continental Europe, he died between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, according to the researchers. READ MORE...
Using what they already knew from the Neanderthals’ sturdy bone structure, the researchers also gleaned information from other skulls that have been found and data regarding their eye, skin, and hair color to help in the recreation of the Neanderthal’s grinning face.
Believed to have lived in Doggerland, which was once dry land but now forms the seabed in the North Sea between the United Kingdom and continental Europe, he died between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, according to the researchers. READ MORE...
Dark Energy On Earth
Hypothesized by physicists to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe, dark energy has never been directly observed or measured. Instead, scientists can only make inferences about it from its effects on the space and matter we can see.
Finding measurable hints of dark energy’s effects on distance objects — and the shape of space itself — is a major goal of major NASA missions, such as the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
But in a new paper published September 15 in the journal Physical Review D a group of cosmologists suggests researchers might not need to peer deep into the cosmos to make second-hand observations of dark energy — it may have been detected right here on Earth.
WHAT’S NEW — In the paper, the researchers claim that hints of dark energy were detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy during an experiment designed to detect dark matter.
The team, comprised mostly of theorists, looked at data from the XENON1T, an experiment designed to detect rare interactions between hypothetical dark matter particles and components of the noble gas xenon held in a special detector.
The odds that dark energy has been detected directly are admittedly low, Jeremy Sakstein, assistant professor of theoretical physics at the University of Hawaii and one of the paper’s authors, tells Inverse.
“There are other explanations for this signal as well,” he says, and at the moment, “we don't know whether it's just a statistical anomaly.”
Statistically, there is a 5 percent chance the detection was an anomaly. The detection of the 2012 discovery Higgs Boson, by comparison, was much more certain — there was only a chance in about 3.5 million that detection was anomalous. READ MORE...
Thursday, September 30
Life Expectancy
Life expectancy at birth is a commonly used metric of a country’s overall health. It estimates how long the average person born in a particular year (2020, for example) would be expected to survive, given current trends in mortality among different age groups.
Over time, life expectancy has trended upward in many countries, thanks to more people living longer into their senior years. But when annual deaths increase significantly for whatever reason, especially when these deaths involve younger people, life expectancy can go down.
In the U.S., for example, life expectancy had inched lower in recent years due largely to drug overdoses.
Researchers in the UK and Denmark tried to quantify the impact of the pandemic last year on the life expectancy of 29 countries, using mortality figures from 2015 to 2020. These countries included the U.S., Chile, and most of Europe. The results were published Monday in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Overall, life expectancy dropped from 2019 to 2020 in 27 out of 29 countries, and 22 countries experienced a drop larger than half a year.
Researchers in the UK and Denmark tried to quantify the impact of the pandemic last year on the life expectancy of 29 countries, using mortality figures from 2015 to 2020. These countries included the U.S., Chile, and most of Europe. The results were published Monday in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
Overall, life expectancy dropped from 2019 to 2020 in 27 out of 29 countries, and 22 countries experienced a drop larger than half a year.
Many countries saw a loss that effectively wiped out five years of progress, with women in 15 countries and men in 10 countries having a life expectancy lower than what was recorded in 2015.
Some, including the U.S., also experienced a year-to-year drop not seen since other great calamities like the end of the Soviet Union or World War II. READ MORE...
Stick Bugs
A large bug is prominent in the photo, but finding it quickly wasn’t easy.
“Camouflage is a marvelous adaptation that allows some critters to exist practically undetected,” the park wrote.
“As September days grow cooler and shorter, a variety of critters still scuttle around in the undergrowth. Whether or not you can find them, however, is another story!”
So where was the bug in the photo?
Right in the middle, apparently. It’s the dead stick — with legs, park rangers said.
Known as a stick bug, the insects are infamous for not only looking like sticks, but they also “may even sway back and forth to more closely resemble a twig moving in the wind,” according to the National Wildlife Federation.
“Depending on the species, walking sticks can grow from 1 to 12 inches (2.5 to 30 centimeters) long,” the federation says. “Stick insects are the biggest insects in the world — one species measures over 20 inches (51 centimeters) long with its legs outstretched.”
The park’s photo has gotten hundreds of reactions, including some who wanted to know if they could get stung by a stick in the park. READ MORE...
Yemen's Well of Hell
The natural sinkhole, officially known as the Well of Barhout, has an eerily circular entrance that spans 98 feet (30 m) in diameter and is located in the middle of the desert in al-Mahra province in eastern
Yemen, close to the border with Oman. Amateur cave explorers have entered the sinkhole before, but until now nobody was known to have made it all the way to the bottom.
Last week, a team of 10 explorers from the Omani Caves Exploration Team (OCET) explored the Well of Barhout using a pulley system that lowered eight of the members to the bottom while the remaining two stayed at the top.
Last week, a team of 10 explorers from the Omani Caves Exploration Team (OCET) explored the Well of Barhout using a pulley system that lowered eight of the members to the bottom while the remaining two stayed at the top.
Wednesday, September 29
Einstein Ring
The smears of light called the Molten Ring, stretched out and warped by gravitational fields, are magnifications and duplications of a galaxy whose light has traveled a whopping 9.4 billion light-years. This magnification has given us a rare insight into the stellar 'baby boom' when the Universe was still in its infancy.
The early evolution of the Universe is a difficult time to understand. It blinked into existence as we understand it roughly 13.8 billion years ago, with the first light emerging (we think) around 1 billion years later. Light traveling for that amount of time is faint, the sources of it small, and dust obscures much of it.
Even the most intrinsically luminous objects are extraordinarily hard to see across that gulf of space-time, so there are large gaps in our understanding of how the Universe assembled itself from primordial soup.
But sometimes the Universe itself offers us a helping hand. If a massive object sits between us and a more distant object, a magnification effect occurs due to the gravitational curvature of space-time around the closer object.
Illustration of gravitational lensing. (NASA, ESA & L. Calçada)Any light that then travels through this space-time follows this curvature and enters our telescopes smeared and distorted – but also magnified and duplicated. These are called Einstein rings, because the effect was predicted by, you guessed it, Albert Einstein.
The phenomenon itself is called gravitational lensing, and while it has given us some absolutely amazing images, it also affords us brilliant opportunities to combine our own magnification capabilities – telescopes – with those of the Universe to see things that might otherwise be too far to make out clearly, or at all. READ MORE...
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