Sunday, January 30, 2011

8 Minute Work-out

Hey gang (just like this guy keeps repeating :)), I'm gonna show you a pack of work-out exercises to keep you in shape and have a killer body. They're not hard and it's only 8 minutes long. So, do yourself a favour and instead of rubbin' the mint all day long on facebook, take 40 minutes of your time and get busy :D 
For a better looking Romania, here you go..

   8 Minute Abs                                                           8 Minute Arms


   8 Minute Buns                                                         8 Minute Legs      


                                        
                              
                                    + Bonus 8 Minute Stretch (ah, that feels good)


Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Hi, I've found this interesting article on Matt Ridley's blog and I tought it would be fair to share it with you guys :p C'mon it won't hurt :)))


From the Wall Street Journal, my latest Mind and Matter on stability, the moon and aliens

This month saw the discovery of the first small and "rocky" planet like ours outside the solar system, Kepler 10b, orbiting a star more than 500 light years away. This month also saw terrible floods in part of Australia. Here I intend to link these two news stories. But don't worry—I have not gone astrological on you. The link is not a causal one.
Kepler 10b is not much like Earth. It weighs nearly five times as much, orbits a similar star at a much closer range—closer than Mercury is to the sun—and is hot enough on its surface to melt iron. So it is unlikely to hold life, at least of a kind we could empathize with. But it does confirm that other stars than ours have rocky planets in their solar systems, and given the gazillions of stars out there, it makes it probable that Earth-like planets, tepid enough to melt ice but not boil water, probably exist.


It therefore surely follows that the universe must be teeming with intelligent life. After all, life got going here pretty early in the planet's story and has now had time to evolve brains big enough to send radio signals into space. Given that many stars are much older than the sun, many planets ought to have achieved the same result a long time ago. In which case, as the physicist Enrico Fermi famously asked, "Where are they?" Why have we not picked up signals from other civilizations?
Somewhere in this chain of logic there must be a flaw; otherwise the airwaves would be crammed with alien chat shows. It was the Brazilian cosmologist Carlos Frenk who told me of a flaw that his colleagues see. Life started early in Earth's history, yes, but it took a long time for us to achieve big enough brains to get technology started. This was because evolution takes time and needs stability.
The Earth has had its share of instability. The most sophisticated life forms kept getting knocked out by catastrophes, of which the near-total extinction of all life at the end of the Permian period and the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous are only two recent examples. But actually, the Earth is an astonishingly stable planet. For four billion years, it mostly has maintained not just a similar climate and a similar orbit but a similar rotation pattern, too.
We have the moon to thank for this, Mr. Frenk says. Our unusually large satellite helps to keep us on an even keel. Without it, we would get occasionally tumbled by the influence of Jupiter. But the moon's birth (blasted from our own surface by an asteroid collision) was a highly improbable event. A bigger collision and the Earth would have been smithereens; a smaller one and the debris would have fallen back to Earth rather than coalesce as a single moon. So here's the flaw in the Fermi paradox: The birth of a moon just the right size to stabilize a rocky planet's orbit and rotation is very improbable.
And Australia? Australia has an unusually unstable climate. It can be sure of getting terrible floods and droughts, but it cannot be sure when. This made it unsuitable for early agriculture, which is why aborigines sensibly did not invent it (as their New Guinea neighbors did when their climate became more stable after the end of the last ice age).
This circumstance made it difficult for Australian hunter-gatherers to form the dense demographic concentrations that gave rise to technological civilization through specialization and the exchange of ideas. If Earth's climate had remained as unstable as Australia's, and as unstable as it was all over the planet during the last ice age, then the radio would never have been invented and the Earth would still be silent. Stability is key.



Monday, January 17, 2011

Mammoth 'could be reborn in four years'



The woolly mammoth, extinct for thousands of years, could be brought back to life in as little as four years thanks to a breakthrough in cloning technology. 

By Julian Ryall in Tokyo 2:13PM GMT 13 Jan 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8257223/Mammoth-could-be-reborn-in-four-years.html


Previous efforts in the 1990s to recover nuclei in cells from the skin and muscle tissue from mammoths found in the Siberian permafrost failed because they had been too badly damaged by the extreme cold.

But a technique pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology, was successful in cloning a mouse from the cells of another mouse that had been frozen for 16 years.
Now that hurdle has been overcome, Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, is reactivating his campaign to resurrect the species that died out 5,000 years ago.

"Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth," he told The Daily Telegraph.

He intends to use Dr Wakayama's technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones.
The nuclei will then be inserted into the egg cells of an African elephant, which will act as the surrogate mother for the mammoth.
Professor Iritani said he estimates that another two years will be needed before the elephant can be impregnated, followed by the approximately 600-day gestation period.

He has announced plans to travel to Siberia in the summer to search for mammoths in the permafrost and to recover a sample of skin or tissue that can be as small as 3cm square. If he is unsuccessful, the professor said, he will ask Russian scientists to provide a sample from one of their finds.

"The success rate in the cloning of cattle was poor until recently but now stands at about 30 per cent," he said. "I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years." 

Friday, January 14, 2011

Star Size Comparison

  I remeber showing this video to some of my friends and their reactions were, like.. wow. 

Yeah, just like the title states it's a short presentation dealing with the size of celestial bodies, where the term ''huge'' is gettin' mind boggling ! This 2 minutes movie can really expand your horizons and shows off the tiny spec, which our blue planet is in the Universe. 

Enjoy






Back Online

Hey everybody, some of you know about the loss of my previous blog, so after a while I've decided to create a new one, with a new e-mail address, Youtube account and so on :D


It's been tough to think about the name and the pattern, it's still in incipient phase and I really hope y'all dig this new look.

Well, here you'll find basically science related stuff, but don't worry I'll slip some fun and usefull insights, videos or whatever :)) Sure, it would be fantastic to have separate sections for everything, but blogspot it's bitchin' about that, I'll see what I can do.

Up next ? Rob the bank... untill next weekend, from me..

See ya'