A flight crew checking the cabin of a Qantas plane before takeoff found rats in a compartment holding medical equipment, grounding the plane for more than a day, a spokeswoman said Thursday.
Crews did a visual check of the plane Tuesday afternoon and found no more rats or any damage. The rodents had been in a cabinet holding a defibrillator.It was really cute when, just before applying the electric shock, one of the little fellas squeaked "Clear!"
A 22-year-old Australian university student has solved a problem which has puzzled astrophysicists for decades, discovering part of the so-called "missing mass" of the universe during her summer break.
Undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie made the breakthrough during a holiday internship with a team at Monash University's School of Physics, locating the mystery material within vast structures called "filaments of galaxies".
Monash astrophysicist Dr Kevin Pimbblet explained that scientists had previously detected matter that was present in the early history of the universe but that could not now be located.
"There is missing mass, ordinary mass not dark mass ... It's missing to the present day," Pimbblet told AFP.
"We don't know where it went. Now we do know where it went because that's what Amelia found.
After a half-century of relative inactivity in the U.S., bedbugs returned in the late 1990s. Nationwide, 95 percent of pest-control companies have treated an infestation in the past year. A decade ago, it was just 22 percent.
In the 1940s and ’50s, liberal use of DDT and other insecticides all but wiped out the pests. Scientists hypothesize that the few that survived proliferated—females can lay up to five eggs a day, and 500 during a lifetime—and passed along pesticide-resistant traits. Millions of bedbug generations later, scientists are finally zeroing in on how, exactly, bedbugs made their comeback.
It was battered and scarred,
And the auctioneer thought it
Hardly worth his while
To waste his time on the old violin,
But he held it up with a smile.
"What am I bid, good people", he cried,
"Who starts the bidding for me?"
"One dollar, one dollar, Do I hear two?"
"Two dollars, who makes it three?"
"Three dollars once, three dollars twice, going for three", But, No,
From the room far back a grey haired man
Came forward and picked up the bow,
Then wiping the dust from the old violin
And tightening up the strings,
He played a melody, pure and sweet,
As sweet as the angel sings.
The music ceased and the auctioneer
With a voice that was quiet and low,
Said "What now am I bid for this old violin?"
As he held it aloft with its' bow.
"One thousand, one thousand, Do I hear two?"
"Two thousand, Who makes it three?"
"Three thousand once, three thousand twice,
Going and gone", said he.
The audience cheered,
But some of them cried,
"We just don't understand."
"What changed its' worth?"
Swift came the reply.
"The Touch of the Masters Hand."
And many a man with life out of tune,
All battered with bourbon and gin,
Is auctioned cheap to a thoughtless crowd
Much like that old violin.
A mess of pottage, a glass of wine,
A game and he travels on.
He is going once, he is going twice,
He is going and almost gone.
But the Master comes,
And the foolish crowd never can quite understand,
The worth of a soul and the change that is wrought
By the Touch of the Master's Hand.
The range of phenomena physics has explained is more than impressive; it underlies the whole of modern civilization. Nevertheless, as a physicist travels along his (in this case) career, the hairline cracks in the edifice become more apparent, as does the dirt swept under the rug, the fudges and the wholesale swindles, with the disconcerting result that the totality occasionally appears more like Bruegel’s Tower of Babel as dreamt by a modern slumlord, a ramshackle structure of compartmentalized models soldered together into a skewed heap of explanations as the whole jury-rigged monstrosity tumbles skyward.A physicist notes the inconsistencies and holes that exist in this study of nature.
[T]he proposal is expected to allow UNL, for the first time, to charge more tuition for some undergraduate programs than for others.
It would be a watershed departure from the concept that all Nebraska resident undergraduates should pay the same tuition for their degrees — currently $198.25 per credit hour — no matter what they study.
UNL previously dipped its toe into this water, however, by enacting a $40 per credit hour fee for engineering classes in 2007. Unlike traditional laboratory fees often charged for certain classes, the fee was not directly linked to a specific classroom expense.
At first glance, this almost makes sense. If students major in a field that costs more to teach, then perhaps it makes sense to charge more for the education. Engineering requires more lab work, more equipment, and maybe better teachers. So, perhaps students should pay for that. English, on the other hand, does not require particular facilities, at least not like those of engineering.
But, if you read the article, university costs are not the issue, at least not by major. The thinking is that an engineering student would make more money upon graduation and could therefore be charged more for his education. The proposed scheme is not based on university costs by major, but rather university costs in total and then those costs are skewed based on expected salaries.
Seems to me that an engineer could argue for a lower price if he promised to take a low paying job. Silly, isn't it?
Illinois professor Nick Fang developed a two-dimensional acoustic cloak that makes objects in the center invisible to sonar and other ultrasound waves.
Speaking of atomic weights, let me recommend the book The Joy of Chemistry: The Amazing Science of Familiar Things . I should say more later, but for now this is a great book to give a layperson a good overview of chemistry. And it includes experiments you can do at home with common household items.Some elements have more than one stable (nonradioactive) isotope—variants of the same substance, but with different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei that alter the mass. (The element's identity is determined by the number of protons.) In those cases the atomic mass listed on the periodic table has traditionally been defined as an average depending on how common each isotope is in nature. But that average is not the same every place on Earth, or in every situation. Just as radiocarbon dating can place a substance in time, isotopic analysis can also pinpoint its location.
So, now instead of carbon listed as being 12.0107 atomic mass units with a measurement uncertainty of about 0.0008, it has an official atomic weight of [12.0096; 12.0116], where the brackets and semicolon indicate an interval of atomic weights. The interval doesn't reflect an uncertainty in measurement precision but rather a real variation of atomic weight from substance to substance. Only 10 elements will have these new intervals, because the others have at most only one stable isotope or because upper and lower bounds have not been quantified.
Two independent groups have now achieved this feat [of invisibility], by building transparent 'carpet cloaks', made from calcite crystals, that lie over the object to be hidden.Seems that special crystals can bend the light rays to hide the object.Carpet cloaks render covered objects invisible by bending light rays as they enter the cloak and then when they exit it -- after they have bounced off the hidden object. The light is deviated in such a way that the rays seem to have been reflected directly from the ground underneath the object -- as though the object was not there.
