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| ©Stan Honda/ AFP/ Getty Images |
| Space shuttle Atlantis mission specialist Stanley Love on Feb. 4, 2008 at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Love is preparing to make a spacewalk to attach the European Space Agency's Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station. |
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| ©AP/National Academy of Sciences, Michael Skrepnickaption |
| This undated handout artist rendering provided by the PNAS/shows a life reconstruction of Nemicolopterus crypticus, a small derived flying reptile that lived in the gingko forests that existed some 120 million years ago in present China. |
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| ©Unknown |
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| ©Hari Manoharan |
| Building a "quantum drum," an atom at a time, with a scanning tunneling microscope. |
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| ©Ohio State University |
| Gravity fluctuations beneath East Antarctica measured by GRACE satellite. Denser regions appear more red; the location of the Wilkes Land crater is circled (above center). |
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| ©Unknown |
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought roams gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way--marking the points with a lean forefinger--as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
'You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.'
'Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?' said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
'I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.'
'That is all right,' said the Psychologist.
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| ©NASA |
| Only 12 humans have walked on the moon, and NASA is currently looking for astronaut candidates who will have the opportunity to build a base there. |
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| ©Unknown |
| A recent rock grind preformed on Sol 1351 |
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| ©Center for Space Physics, Boston University |
| Mercury's tail of sodium gas captured by a wide-angle telescope showing an enormous extent of the atoms escaping from the planet's surface. The insert shows the source regions of the tail gases imaged at a different time using a very narrow field of view telescope. The source regions occur at high latitudes, probably related to solar wind access to Mercury's surface along specific magnetic field lines. The impacts of the solar wind ions and electrons result in sputtering sodium from the surface. Since Mercury is close to the Sun, the sputtered atoms are pushed away by the pressure of light, with this photon radiation pressure leading to the long tail. The brightness of the source regions is about 1 million times greater than the faintest part of the distant tail. The sizes of the source regions span about 1/2 of the planet's radius, while the tail extends to about 1500 times the radius of the planet, about 1.5 million miles. |
