Polycephaly Is The Condition Of Having More Than One Head. Two-headed Animals (called Bicephalic Or Dicephalic)

A little more help for focusing-on beginers: In terms of cognitive demand, it is more difficult to focusing on your ongoing task when you have a long to-do list than when only a few more tasks left. So I recommend you to try making schedule with less than 5 tasks a day. It will be much easier to organize work of different fields or of different shades of cognitive demand.

How focusing (aka. not multi-tasking) changed my study life

I had heard it occasionally - that multi-tasking was actually not good for the quality of whatever task I was doing. It made sense, but I loved mult-tasking so much. It gave me the illusion of productivity. 

Until I actually tried focusing for a while, did I realise how much I was actually losing by multi-tasking -  educationally and emotionally. Scrolling through tumblr during boring parts of a lecture seemed fine, since there were notes and it probably wouldn’t be tested in such depth anyway. Eating, while scrolling through social media, while watching a tv show, while messaging someone on facebook seemed ‘productive’. 

It turns out it was the opposite. It may seem fine, and at times it may actually be okay, but what matters is the principle. Dedicating your whole being to one task, focusing on it, produces much better results. It’s a quality over quantity thing. It also helped to calm me down emotionally - I used to always feel rushed, like there was so many things to do but not enough time to do them. Focusing on one task at a time - though it was hard at first - helped slow me down because I did everything properly, and didn’t have the feeling like I needed to go back and do things over again. 

Focusing on one thing wholly is also a form of practising mindfulness. Mindfulness ‘meditation’ isn’t something that requires you to sit down and meditate - it can be applied to our daily life. 

Since I started practising this mindful skill of focus, I’ve become much calmer, it’s been so much easier to stay on top of my work load and meet deadlines, I don’t feel rushed, I don’t feel unprepared or unorganised, and I do more quality work than when I used to multi-task.

There are times for multi-tasking and times for focus. Find the right balance and enjoy the task in front of you.

We’re used to radiation being invisible. With a Geiger counter, it gets turned into audible clicks. What you see above, though, is radiation’s effects made visible in a cloud chamber. In the center hangs a chunk of radioactive uranium, spitting out alpha and beta particles. The chamber also has a reservoir of alcohol and a floor cooled to -40 degrees Celsius. This generates a supersaturated cloud of alcohol vapor. When the uranium spits out a particle, it zips through the vapor, colliding with atoms and ionizing them. Those now-charged ions serve as nuclei for the vapor, which condenses into droplets that reveal the path of the particle. The characteristics of the trails are distinct to the type of decay particle that created them. In fact, both the positron and muon were first discovered in cloud chambers! (Image credit: Cloudylabs, source)

Anticrepuscular Rays Over Florida

N44C nebula

On the middle left of the image is a source of its artistic likeness, a network of nebulous filaments surrounding the Wolf-Rayet star. This type of rare star is characterized by an exceptionally vigorous “wind” of charged particles. The shock of the wind colliding with the surrounding gas causes the gas to glow.

The Wolf-Rayet star is part of N44C, a nebula of glowing hydrogen gas surrounding young stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Visible from the Southern Hemisphere, the Large Magellanic Cloud is a small companion galaxy to the Milky Way.

What makes N44C peculiar is the temperature of the star that illuminates it. The most massive stars — those that are 10 to 50 times more massive than the Sun — have maximum temperatures of 30,000 to 50,000 degrees Celsius (54,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The temperature of this star is about 75,000 degrees Celsius (135,000 degrees Fahrenheit). This unusually high temperature may be due to a neutron star or black hole that occasionally produces X-rays but is now inactive.

N44C is part of a larger complex that includes young, hot, massive stars, nebulae, and a “superbubble” blown out by multiple supernova explosions. Part of the superbubble is seen in red at the very bottom left of the Hubble image.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Hubble

Theories about the Origins of Space and Time. 1. Gravity as Thermodynamics Entropic gravity is a theory in modern physics that describes gravity as an entropic force - not a fundamental interaction mediated by a quantum field theory and a gauge particle, but a consequence of physical systems’ tendency to increase their entropy.  2. Loop Quantum Gravity According to Einstein, gravity is not a force – it is a property of space-time itself. Loop quantum gravity is an attempt to develop a quantum theory of gravity based directly on Einstein’s geometrical formulation. The main output of the theory is a physical picture of space where space is granular. More precisely, space can be viewed as an extremely fine fabric or network “woven” of finite loops. These networks of loops are called spin networks. The evolution of a spin network over time is called a spin foam. The predicted size of this structure is the Planck length, which is approximately 10−35 meters. According to the theory, there is no meaning to distance at scales smaller than the Planck scale. Therefore, LQG predicts that not just matter, but space itself, has an atomic structure. 3. Causal Sets Its founding principles are that spacetime is fundamentally discrete and that spacetime events are related by a partial order. The theory postulates that the building blocks of space-time are simple mathematical points that are connected by links, with each link pointing from past to future. Such a link is a bare-bones representation of causality, meaning that an earlier point can affect a later one, but not vice versa. The resulting network is like a growing tree that gradually builds up into space-time. 4. Causal Dynamical Triangulations The idea is to approximate the unknown fundamental constituents with tiny chunks of ordinary space-time caught up in a roiling sea of quantum fluctuations, and to follow how these chunks spontaneously glue themselves together into larger structures. The space-time building blocks were simple hyper-pyramids (four-dimensional counterparts to three-dimensional tetrahedrons) and the simulation’s gluing rules allowed them to combine freely. The result was a series of bizarre ‘universes’ that had far too many dimensions (or too few), and that folded back on themselves or broke into pieces. 5. Holography In this model, the three-dimensional interior of the universe contains strings and black holes governed only by gravity, whereas its two-dimensional boundary contains elementary particles and fields that obey ordinary quantum laws without gravity. Hypothetical residents of the three-dimensional space would never see this boundary, because it would be infinitely far away. But that does not affect the mathematics: anything happening in the three-dimensional universe can be described equally well by equations in the two-dimensional boundary, and vice versa.

death of a star by a supernova explosion,

and the birth of a black hole

Jupiter’s Galilean Moons

Io - Jupiter’s volcanic moon

Europa -  Jupiter’s icy moon

Ganymede - Jupiter’s (and the solar system’s) largest moon

Callisto -  Jupiter’s heavily cratered moon

Made using: Celestia, Screen2Gif & GIMP Based on: @spaceplasma‘s solar system gifs Profile sources: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/joviansatfact.html

Comet ISON appears to have broken up and mostly evaporated as it travelled around the Sun, but something has made it around. It will be seen how much and in what condition. (Source of images) UPDATE: It is now confirmed that the comet is gone. Rest in pieces, ISON!

(no word to describe this feeling)

eat mor chikin

Space Infographicsby Nick Wiinikka

prints/poster/phone cases and more by the artist available here